
Glass _ 3 f" % & I 

Book .N ll Jft 



NASOLOGY: 



OR, 



HINTS TOWARDS A CLASSIFICATION 

OF NOSES. 

- J8£er 
BY EDEN WARWICK. 



" 'Mayhap there is more meant than is said in it* quoth my father 
'Learned men, brother Toby, don't write dialogues upon long Noses 
for nothing.'"— tristram shandy. 




LOND'ON: 
RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. 

1848. 






LONDON. 

Printed by Schulze and Co., 13, Poland Street. 



36 



1 *^"5> 



PREFACE 



With regard to a Preface to his Book, an 
Author has to contend with three great, but 
unequal, difficulties. The first and greatest, is 
to persuade his Publisher to issue it without a 
Preface; the next, is to write one himself; and 
the third and least, is to get some one to write 
it for him. Now there is a wise old saw 
which says, " Of divers evils choose the least;" 
and as the learned Slawkenbergius (so says 
Tristram Shandy) has prefaced his folio on 
Noses with a clause which exactly explains our 
own qualifications, and reasons, for writing on 



IV PREFACE. 

the same important subject, we invoke him to 
relieve us of the third difficulty : " ' ever since I 
understood,' quoth Slawkenbergius, ' anything — 
or rather what was what — and could perceive 
that the point of long Noses had been too loosely 
handled by all who had gone before — have I, 
Slawkenbergius, felt a strong impulse, with a 
mighty and irresistible call within me, to gird 
up myself to this undertaking/ " 

Now this is exactly our own case, and must, 
therefore, suffice for our Preface; nevertheless, 
we cannot flatter ourselves that our brief hints 
will be eulogized, like the gigantic folio of Hafen 
Slawkenbergius, as " an institute of all that is 
necessary to be know T n of Noses." It professes 
to be nothing more than an introduction to the 
subject of Nasology ; written originally for the 
use of friends, and afterwards extended for publi- 
cation. This will account for some discrepancies 
which may be perceptible in the style — dis- 
crepancies which it was thought best not to 
remove, as the additions were on subjects of a 



PREFACE. V 

more grave and important character than the 
original sketch ; and, therefore, the diversities of 
style appeared to be rather consistent and 
advantageous. 

may 26, 1848. 



CONTENTS. 





PACE 


Preface . 


iii 


CHAPTER I. 




Of the Classification of Noses 


1 


CHAPTER II. 


• 


Of the Roman Nose 


. 22 


CHAPTER HI. 




Of the Greek Nose 


. 74 



CHAPTER IV. 

Of the Cogitative Nose . . .86 

CHAPTER V. 

How to get a Cogitative Nose . .104 

CHAPTER VI. 
Of the Jewish Nose . . .156 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER VII. 

PAGE 

Of the Snub Nose and the Celestial Nose . 172 



CHAPTER VIII. 

Of Feminine Noses . . . 1 84 

CHAPTER IX. 

Of National Noses . . .208 



NASOLOGY. 

CHAPTER L 

OF THE CLASSIFICATION OF NOSES. 

It has not been hastily, nor until after 
long and careful observation, that the theory 
propounded in the following pages has been 
published; a theory which, at first sight, may 
appear to some wild and absurd, to others 
simply ridiculous, to others wicked and heretical,* 

* It would be rather amusing, if it were not a 
melancholy sign of human perverseness, to sum up all 
the hypotheses which have been at their first promulgation 
pronounced impious and heretical. The denial of the 
approaching End of the World in any century after 
Christ ; the Copernican System ; Inoculation and 
Vaccination for the Small-pox; the change of the 
Style of the year; Geology, Phrenology, &c, &c, 
would be included in the list of umquhile heresies. 

B 



2 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

and to others fraught with social mischief and 
danger. 

Nevertheless, we shall not begin by depre- 
cating the ridicule, or the censure of any one. 
The only vindication which an author is entitled 
to offer, is that which his works themselves 
present. If his cause is a good one, it requires no 
apology ; if it is a bad one, to vindicate it is 
either useless or baneful ; useless, if it blinds 
no one to his errors; baneful, if it induces 
any one blindly to receive his brass for sterling 
gold. 

The only circumstance which can attach any 
value to our observations is, that they are 
entirely original, and wholly unbiassed by the 
theories of any other writers on physiognomy. 
When we commenced observing Noses, we 
just knew that some few forms of the Nose 
had names given them, as the Roman, the 
Greek, &c. ; but we regarded these as mere 
artistic definitions of form, and were wholly 
ignorant what mental characteristics had been 
ascribed to them. So far as this nomenclature 
went, it appeared best to adopt it, as affording 
well-known designations of Nasal profiles ; and 



OF NOSES. 3 

our investigations were, therefore, commenced 
by endeavouring to discover whether these 
forms of Nose characterized any, and what, 
mental properties. In order to do this with 
accuracy, it was absolutely necessary still to 
keep the mind unacquainted with the system 
of any other writers, if such there were, lest it 
should unconsciously imbibe preconceptions and 
hints which would render its independent 
researches open to the suspicion of bias, We 
felt that if the characteristics attributed by us 
to Noses, after long and extensive observation, 
corresponded with those of any other writer, 
a powerful corroboration of our views would 
thus be gained. 

It may happen, therefore, and it is hoped 
it will be so, that we may sometimes appear 
to have plagiarized from other physiognomists, 
and to have adopted their views ; but this 
correspondence must, nevertheless, be accepted 
as a further proof of the accuracy of our honest 
independent labours. 

It was impossible, however, amidst much 
multifarious reading, to keep the mind, latterly, 
wholly ignorant that some mental characteristics 

b 2 



4 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

had been ascribed to Noses ; but into the 
nature of these we never inquired, nor are 
we now aware that anything has been done, 
beyond the throwing out of a few uncon- 
nected, unattested hints, towards a systematic 
deduction of mental qualifications from Nasal 
formation. 

If it is improper to vindicate one's self, it 
might not seem altogether unfitting to vindicate 
one's subject from ridicule ; and it might appear 
prudent, if not altogether necessary, to com- 
mence by vindicating the Nose from the 
charge of being too ridiculous an organ to be 
seriously discoursed upon. But this ridiculous- 
ness is mere prejudice ; intrinsically one part 
of the face is as worthy as another, and we 
may feel assured that He who gave the OS 
sublime to man, did not place, as its foremost 
and most prominent feature, a ridiculous appen- 
dage. 

To come then at once to our subject. We 
have a belief, founded on long-continued. 
personal observation, that there is more in a 
Nose than most owners of that appendage 
are generally aware. We believe that, besides 



OF NOSES. 5 

being an ornament to the face, or a convenient 

handle by which to grasp an impudent fellow, it 

is an important index to its owner's character ; 

and that the accurate observation and minute 

comparison of an extensive collection of Noses 

of persons whose mental characteristics are 

known, justifies a Nasal Classification, and a 

deduction of some points of mental organization 

therefrom. It will not be contended that all 

the faculties and properties of mind are revealed 

by the Nose ; — for instance, we can read 

nothing of Temper or the Passions from it. # 

Perhaps it rather reveals Power and Taste — 

Power or Energy to carry out Ideas, and the 

Taste or Inclination which dictates or guides 

them. As these will always very much form 

a man's outward character, the proposition 

which is sought to be established is this : — 

"the Nose is an important Index to 

Character." 



* We shall endeavour to speak of mind in popular 
phraseology, instead of in the obscure terms in which 
metaphysicians envelop their ignorance of mental 
phenomena. 



> 



6 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

It may be prudent to observe that we 
utterly repudiate the doctrine of the Phreno- 
logists, that the form of the Body affects the 
I manifestations, and even properties, of the 
Mind. 

We contend that the Mind forms the 
Nose, and not the Nose the Mind. We have 
carefully endeavoured to avoid phraseology 
which should induce a supposition that we 
entertain the latter absurdity ; but here enter 
this protest once for all, lest a want of 
precision in our language, or the obtuse i 
of critics should cause us to be charged with 
it. 

And here we might descant, at considerable 
length, and with much show of learning, on 
the influence of the Mind over the Body. We 
might impugn the wisdom of those who, 
undertaking to cure either, have forgotten that 
they were so intimately united and mutually 
dependent, that they could not be treated 
separately with success. We might shew that 
the first step of the physician towards curing 
mental disorder, is to free the body from 
disease; and that of him who would cure the 



OF NOSES. 7 

body, is, ofttimes, to apply his remedies to the 
derangement of the mind. But, though by so 
doing we might swell our pages and eke out 
an additional chapter — an important considera- 
tion if we were a mere book-maker — we shall 
not, as we have some qualms of conscience 
whether it would be quite germane to the 
matter in hand. It might not, however, be 
out of place to remind the reader that phy- 
siognomy, or the form which mind gives 
to the features, is universally recognised. A 
pleasant mouth, a merry eye, a sour visage, a 
stern aspect are some of the common phrases 
by which we daily acknowledge ourselves to be 
physiognomists ; for by these expressions we 
mean, not that the mouth is pleasant or the 
visage sour, but that such is the mind which 
shines out from them. If it were the face 
alone which we thus intended, we should never 
trouble or concern ourselves about a human 
countenance, nor be attracted, nor repulsed by 
one, any more than if it were a carved head 
on a gothic waterspout, or a citizen's door- 
knocker. We all acknowledge the impression 



8 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

given by the mind to the mouth and the 
eyes because they express Temper and the 
Passions — those feelings which more imme- 
diately interest us in our mutual intercourse — 
and because they change with the feelings ; 
now flashing with anger, or sparkling with 
pleasure, compressing with rage, or smiling with 
delight. 

But because the Nose is uninfluenced by the 
feelings which agitate and vary the mind, and, 
is, therefore, immoveable and unvaried, no one 
will hear the theory of Nasology broached with- 
out incredibility and risibility. Because the 
Nose is subject only to those faculties of mind 
which are permanent and unfluctuating ; and is, 
therefore, likewise permanent and unfluctuating 
in its form, men have paid no attention to its 
indications, and will, accordingly, abuse as an 
empiric and dotard the first Nasologist. But, 
is there, a priori, any thing so unreasonable 
in attributing mental characteristics to the 
Nose, when we all daily read each other's 
minds in the Nose's next door neighbours, the 
eyes and mouth ? Is not the a priori inference 



OF NOSES. 9 

entirely in favour of a negative reply? And 
that, a posteriori, it may confidently be replied 
to in the negative will, it is hoped, presently 
appear. 

There is here room for another long disquisi- 
tion to point out the advantages of Nasology. 
How that the permanency and immobility of the 
Nose forbid hypocrisy to mould it to any arti- 
ficial feelings, as the eyes and the mouth may 
be. And how this immobility, together with its 
prominency and incapability of being concealed, 
like bad phrenological bumps, render it a sure 
guide to some parts of our fellow-creature's 
mental organization. But it would be premature 
to do this before proving somewhat of the truth 
of Nasology ; and when that is done, no one will 
deny that it has its uses, though it may be dis- 
puted what those are. 

Nevertheless, we must earnestly protest against 
the fallacy of attempting to judge what any per- 
son is from his Nose ; we can only judge of 
natural tendency and capacity — education and 
external circumstances of a thousand different 
kinds, may have swerved the mind from its 

B 3 



10 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

original tendency, or prevented the development 
of inherent faculties. It is in this unfair and 
uncharitable asserting dogmatically the disposi- 
tion and character, vices and virtues of a man, 
that phrenologists so greatly err ; whereas they 
ought to confine their inferences from external 
development of organs, to capacity and tendency 
only. 

The impossibility of giving such numerous 
pictorial illustrations as the subject properly 
demands, will confine the examples adduced to 
those only of which portraits are well known 
and easily accessible. If, therefore, the proofs 
are thought insufficient in number, it must be 
attributed to this circumstance alone. It would 
have been easy to have swelled them by a 
number of names, the right of which to be 
included in the lists the majority of persons 
would have been unable to verify. Nevertheless. 
the examples will be found much more nume- 
rous and more easily verifiable than those which 
have been deemed sufficient to establish Phreno- 
logy as an hypothesis, if not as a science ; and, 
had we, like the principal expounder of 



OF NOSES. 11 

Phrenology,* dragged in as "proofs" nameless 
gentlemen of our acquaintance, we might have 
still further swelled the lists of examples. But 
it seemed to our humble judgment, to be 
demanding more from the reader's good nature 
than would be compatible with sound criticism, 
to ask him to accept such unsupported dicta as 
proofs. Of course, very many of the examples 
by which our own mind has been satisfied have 
been drawn from personal observation, among 
friends and acquaintance ; and not only have 
these been the most numerous proofs, but also 
by far the most satisfactory, as they afforded the 
most exact and undeniable profiles, and the 
most noticeable mental characteristics. The 
slightest incorrectness in the artist, may render 
useless a pictorial example; but, when we are 
looking upon the original himself, there can be 
no mistake. A thousand minutiae of character 
may escape a biographer, which appear plainly 
in the man himself. 

Nevertheless, we felt so strongly how unfitting 



* See Combe's Phrenology ; passim. 



12 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

it would be to offer such mere personal obser- 
vations as proofs, that we have carefully 
refrained from admitting any example which 
is not open to the observation of almost even- 
one. 

This is a drawback which we feel greatly ; it 
reduces our instances to a hundredth part of 
those which might be adduced ; but we must 
submit to it, only asking of the reader's gene- 
rosity to take it into account. Another favour 
which we beg is, that the reader will suspend 
his judgment until the subject is concluded, 
and he has the whole system with all its proofs 
before him. 

We scruple not to admit, that at present 
the system is incomplete. We rather court 
inquiry, and solicit additional facts, than peremp- 
torily dogmatize on conclusions drawn from 
our own limited — though extensive — number 
of observations. But it is so much the fashion 
for every wild theorist to dogmatize on his 
theory, and insist upon it, per fas et nefa> 
perfect, unassailable, and complete, that it is 
almost deemed reprehensible to suggest a notion 
for the consideration of the world, or to pro- 



OF NOSES. 13 

pound anything which the author is modest 
enough to admit is improvable. Such, however, 
was not the manner of the true philosophers of 
former days. If Copernicus had delayed pro- 
pounding the system of the universe which 
bears his name, until he could explain by it all 
the planetary and sidereal motions, it might 
have slumbered unknown for another century 
or two, and so we should not yet have arrived at 
our present enlarged understanding of it. If 
Bacon had waited for a complete Natural His- 
tory, ere he published his Novum Organum, 
we might still have been groping after the 
Sciences with the dark-lanthorn of Aristotle 
and the schools. If Newton had withheld his 
theory of Light until he could burn a diamond, 
our knowledge of the nature of Light might 
still be in its infancy. 

These examples must furnish an apology for 
submitting for candid consideration and further 
development, a theory which we believe to be 
well founded, but which is capable of improve- 
ment and extension. 

Subject to the foregoing remarks, the follow- 



14 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

ing Physical Classification of Noses is submitted, 
as being, in part, well-known and long-esta- 
blished, because well - defined and clearly 
marked : — 

Class I. The Roman, or Aquiline Nose. 
„ II. The Greek, or Straight Nose. 
„ ill. The Cogitative, or Wide-nostrillcd 

Nose. 
„ IV. The Jewish, or Hawk Nose. 
„ V. The Snub Nose, and 
„ VI. The Celestial, or Turn-up Nose. 

Between these there are infinite crosses and 
intermixtures which will at first embarrass the 
student, but which after a little practice, he will 
be able to distinguish with tolerable precision, 
A compound of different Noses will of course 
indicate a compound character ; and it is only 
in the rather rare instance of a perfect Nose of 
any of the classes that we find a character cor- 
respondingly strongly developed. We shall 
endeavour to support each part of the hypo- 
thesis by well-defined and striking instant 
selecting the most decided and perfect noses of 




OF NOSES. 15 

each class, and at the same time the most pecu- 
liar and decided characters. 

Class I. The Roman, or Aquiline Nose, 
is rather convex, but undulating as 
its name aquiline imports. It is 
usually rugose and coarse ; but when 
otherwise it approaches the Greek 
nose, and the character is materially 
altered. 

It indicates great Decision, considerable 
Energy, Firmness, Absence of refinement, and 
Disregard for the bienseances of life. 

Class II. The Greek, or Straight Nose, 
is perfectly straight ; any deviation 
from the right line must be strictly 
noticed. If the deviation tend to 
convexity, it approaches the Roman 
Nose, and the character is improved 
by an accession of energy; on the 
other hand, when the deviation is towards 
concavity, it partakes of the " Celestial," and 
the character is weakened. It should be fine 
and well-chiselled, but not sharp. 




16 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

It indicates Refinement of character, Love for 
the fine arts and belles-lettres, Astuteness, craft 
and a preference for indirect, rather than direct 
action. Its owner is not without some energy 
in pursuit of that which is agreeable to his 
tastes; but, unlike the owner of the Roman 
Nose, he cannot exert himself in opposition to 
his tastes. When associated with the Roman 
Nose, and distended slightly at the end by the 
Cogitative, it indicates the most useful and 
intellectual of characters ; and is the highest 
and most beautiful form which the organ can 
assume.* 

* The Platonic theory that beauty of form generally 
indicates beauty of mind, is finely condensed by Spenser 
into a single line : 

" All that is good is beautiful and fair." 

A HYMN OF HEAVENLY BEAUTY. 

And again : 

" All that fair is, is by nature good ; 
That is a sign to know the gentle blood.'* 

IBID. 

Wordsworth would also appear to be a Platonist : 
" For passions link'd to forms so fair 
And stately, needs must have their share 
Of noble sentiment." 

RUTH. 




OF NOSES. 17 

Class III. The Cogitative, or Wide- 
nostrilled Nose, is, as its secondary 
name imports, wide at the end, 
thick and broad ; not clubbed, but 
gradually widening from below the 
bridge. The other noses are seen in 
profile, but this in full face. 

It indicates a Cogitative mind, having strong 
powers of Thought, and given to close and 
serious Meditation. Its indications are of course 
much dependent on the form of the Nose in 
profile, which decides the turn the cogitative 
power will take. Of course, it never occurs 
alone; and is usually associated with Classes I 
and II, rarely with IV, still more seldom with 
V and VI. * The entire absence of it produces 
the " sharp" nose, which is not classified, as 
sharpness is only a negative quality, being the 
defect of breadth,f and, therefore, indicates 
defect of cogitative power. 

* A Nose should never be judged of in profile only ; 
but should be. examined also in front to see whether it 
partakes of Class III. 

t Thus Phrenologists rightly urge that negative 




18 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

Class IV. The Jewish, or Hawk Nose, is 
very convex, and preserves its con- 
vexity like a bow, throughout the 
whole length from the eyes to the tip. 
It is thin and sharp. 

It indicates considerable Shrewdness 
in worldly matters ; a deep Insight into 
character, and facility of turning that insight 
to profitable account. 

Classes V and VI. The Snub Nose, and 
the Turn-up, poetice Celes- 
tial Nose. The form of 
the former is sufficiently 
indicated by its name. The 
latter is distinguished by 
its presenting a continuous concavity from the 
eyes to the tip. It is converse in shape to the 
Jewish nose. 

N.B. The Celestial must not be confounded 



qualities require no organ. Hate, is only the absence 
of Benevolence ; dislike to children, a defective Philo- 
progenitiveness. 



OF NOSES. 19 

with a Nose, which, belonging to one of the 
other classes in the upper part, terminates in 
a slight distension of the tip ; for this, so far 
from prejudicing the character, rather adds to its 
warmth and activity. 

We associate the Snub and the Celestial in 
nearly the same category, as they both indicate 
natural weakness, mean, disagreeable disposition, 
with petty insolence, and divers other charac- 
teristics of conscious weakness, which strongly 
assimilate them (indeed, a true Celestial Nose 
is only a Snub turned up) ; while their general 
poverty of distinctive character, makes it almost 
impossible to distinguish them. Nevertheless 
there is a difference between their indications ; 
arising, however, rather from difference of 
intensity than of character. The Celestial is, by 
virtue of its greater length, decidedly preferable 
to the Snub ; as it has all the above unfortu- 
nate propensities in a much less degree, and is 
not without some share of small shrewdness, 
and fox-like common sense; on which, how- 
ever, it is apt to presume, and is, therefore, a 
more impudent Nose than the Snub. 



20 OF THE CLASSIFICATION 

The following subordinate rules are appli- 
cable to all Noses, and must be attended to 
before forming a judgment on any Nose. 

1 . The character of a Nose is weakened in 
intensity by forming too great, or too small an 
angle with the general profile of the face. This 
angle, if as great as 40° is not good, anything 
beyond that is bad ; about 30° is best. Angles : 




45«. 40<\ 

become a snub. 

2. Attention should be paid to the angle 
which the basal line of the Nose forms with 
the upper lip. This angle affects intensity, 
and also temperament. If it is an obtuse 



y 



angle, as thus ^ , the consequent abbrevia- 
tion of the Nose (for a long Nose has always 
more Power than a short one) weakens the 
character, but the temperament is cheerful, gay 
and lively ; if on the other hand the angle is 

acute, as thus >j , the elongation of the Nose 

J 



OF NOSES. 21 

adds much to the intensity of the character 
indicated by the profile ; but the disposition is 
generally melancholy, and, if a very acute angle, 
desponding and fond of gloomy thoughts. 
Dante, Fox (the Martyrologist), John Knox, 
Calvin, E. Spenser, and George Herbert, are 
illustrations of the melancholy Nose. 




CHAPTER II. 

OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

Class I. — The Roman, or Aquiline Nose, is rather con- 
vex, but undulating, as its name aquiline imports. It 
is usually rugose and coarse ; but when other* 
approaches the Greek Nose, and the character is 
materially altered. 

It indicates great Decision, considerable Energy, Firm- 
ness, Absence of refinement, and Disregard for the 
bieiistances of life. 

Numerous portraits, both in marble and 
on coins, demonstrate that this Nos 
very frequent among the Romans, and pecu- 
liarly characteristic of that nation. Hence it^ 
name. The persevering energy, stern deter- 
mination and unflinching firmness oi tin con- 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 23 

querors of the world ; their rough, unrefined 
character, which, notwithstanding the example 
of Greece, never acquired the polish of that 
country, all indicate the accuracy of the 
mental habit attributed to the owner of this 
Nose. 

Sufficient stress has never been laid by his- 
torians on national characteristics. The pecu- 
liar psychonomy of nations is an element which 
is never taken into account, when the historical 
critic endeavours to elucidate the causes and 
consequences of events. He judges of all 
nations by the standard of his own, regardless 
of age, climate, physiognomy and psychonomy. 
This is as absurd as the fashion the Greeks had 
of deducing foreign names and titles from the 
Greek, a practice which Cicero wittily ridicules. 
In this ridicule we willingly join ; yet we are 
equally open to it, when we interpret the 
action of foreign nations by our own national 
standard. 

It was the psychonomic difference between 
the Romans and the Greeks, which prevented 
the former from benefiting so efficiently from 
the lessons in art and philosophy of the latter 



24 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

as they would have done, had their minds been 
congenial. 

The refinement which Rome received from 
Greece, w 7 as converted in the transfer into a 
refinement of coarse sensual luxury. Rome 
after the conquest of Greece filled its forums and 
halls with Greek workmanship, and its schools 
with Greek learning ; nevertheless Roman mind 
advanced not one step beyond its original 
coarseness. 

At the period when Rome possessed itself by 
conquest of the principal works of Grecian art, 
her citizens only regarded them as household 
furniture of but little value. Polybius narrates 
that, after the siege of Corinth, he saw some 
Roman soldiers playing at dice upon a picture of 
Bacchus by Aristides ; a picture esteemed one of 
the finest in the world. When King Attalus 
offered 600,000 sesterces, (£4,845 15s.) for 
this picture, Mummius, the Roman Consul, 
thinking there must be some magic property in 
it, to make it worth such an enormous 
sum, refused to sell it, and hung it up in 
the Temple of Ceres at Rome. So little were 
the Romans conscious of the real value of the 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 25 

treasures of Greek art, that Mummius cove- 
nanted with the masters of the ships, hired to 
convey the spoils of Corinth to Rome, that if 
any of the exquisite paintings and statuary 
should be lost, they should replace them with 
new ones /* 

It is not surprising, therefore, that Rome, 
although possessed of infinitely greater wealth, 
a larger population, and the splendid examples 
of Greece, not only produced no artist of merit, 
but receded far from the high standard which 
Greece, notwithstanding its internal divisions, 
its comparative poverty, small extent, and un- 
assisted genius, had established. There is no 
way of accounting for these facts, but by the 
difference in their psychonomy. The genius 
of Rome was of a very different nature from 
that of Greece, and was incompetent to advance 
the great work which the latter had com- 
menced. 

This is an example which, with numerous 
others that occur in the world's history, might 
teach those who, in modern phrase, assert that 

* Hooke's Rom. Hist. B. vi. c. i. 

C 



26 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

the uniform order of the world is progress, that 
retrogression has ofttimes been the apparent 
order, and that it is a foolish short-sightedness 
to judge of the order of the world from a few 
hundred years in its history. The Greek who 
remembered the magnificent works of his coun- 
try, and looked upon the degenerate splendour 
of Rome, no doubt equally dogmatically, 
asserted that the world was in its dotage, that 
it had retrograded, and would never be re- 
generated. 

But the modern dogmatist tries to take his 
case out of the argument, by pretending that 
Christianity will protect the world from again 
retrograding. This is the mere pride of the 
Pharisee, who flatters himself that he is not as 
other men are, that his Christianity is too pure 
to fall, and his knowledge too vast to be blasted. 
Or else he forgets that the pure Christianity of 
the first disciples and martyrs tailed to preserve 
succeeding generations from the inroads of sin 
and darkness more overwhelming than had ever 
blackened the face of Europe since the com- 
mencement of the historical period. The dog- 
matist of those da\s sighed over the world's 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 27 

degeneracy, and saw not through the surround- 
ing gloom, an hopeful gleam of light ; just as 
the modern dogmatist rejoices over the world's 
advance, without perceiving any overhanging 
shadow of darkness. 

Both judge of the world by their own time 
and circumstances, just as we are too apt to 
judge of each other by ourselves. 

A due regard to the psychonomy of nations 
would throw much light upon many abstruse 
points of history, and often serve to corrobo- 
rate narrations which appear marvellous and 
incredible to us. Thus, as we have for the 
most part,* left off eating human flesh in these 



* We write thus reservedly because there are some 
well attested recent instances of cannibalism in Ireland. 
The following anecdote is likewise narrated by Leyden. 
" Reiterated complaints having been made to James I. 
of Scotland, of the cruelties of the Sheriff of Mearns, 
James exclaimed, ' Sorra' gin the Shirra' were sodden, 
an* supp'd in brooY Thereupon four Lairds decoyed 
the Sheriff to the top of the hill of Garrock, and having 
prepared a fire and a boiling cauldron, they plunged the 
unlucky man into the latter. After he was sodden for 
a sufficient time, the savages fulfilled to the letter the 

c 2 



28 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 



islands for some thousand years or more, histo- 
rians reject as utterly incredible that our fore- 
fathers were cannibals ; and some still more 
tender-hearted philanthropists even venture to 
assert that cannibalism has not and never had 
an existence anywhere. Whereas if they would 
compare the evidence with the psychonomy of 
the nations of whom the circumstance is nar- 
rated, instead of with our own, they would in- 
stantly perceive in it nothing unnatural nor 
incredible. Thus also infidel writers, unable to 
comprehend the fervent and assured hope of a 
blessed immortality which supported the mar- 
tyrs, deny, as repugnant to human nature, the 
patient sufferings of the early Christians. And 
thus again commentators on the Bible, both 
infidel and credent, have made sad havoc of 
many texts, by endeavouring to interpret them 
by European manners and habits. This 



King's hasty exclamation by supping the shirra-broo /" 
If the subject were more agreeable to dwell upon, it 
would be easy to furnish many other well-attested in- 
stances of the slacking of the hunger and thirst of 
revenge by a repast of human flesh. 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 29 

inattention to national psychonomy is more- 
over a fertile cause of the maladministration of ! / 
colonies, and was the root of nine-tenths (A^LOL 
of the errors in Indian affairs during the last 
century. 

Seeing then the importance of fully under- 
standing the psychonomy of nations before 
criticizing their records, we should reject no 
probable key to that important knowledge ; and, 
if physiognomy would furnish such a key, it 
should be hailed as an important element in 
historical criticism. This consideration has 
induced us to complete our system by a few 
remarks on National Noses. For no part of the 
physiognomy is more important to be compre- 
hended than the Nose, if Nasology is correct ; 
because the mental faculties which it pourtrays 
are more important than those revealed in the 
other features ; and because, being immoveable 
and permanent in its outline, the artist gives us 
its national or individual form, without the dis- 
tortion which the action or passion exhibited 
may make it necessary to throw over the other 
more pliant features. 

Reserving then till a future chapter any 



30 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

further observations on National Noses, we will 
now consider a few individual instances of the 
Roman Nose. 

This Nose is common to all great conquerors 
and warriors, and other persons who have 
exhibited vast energy and perseverance in 
overcoming great obstacles without regard 
to personal ease, or the welfare of their fellow- 
men. 

The following have pure, or very nearly pure, 
Roman Noses : — 
Rameses II.* 
Julius Caesar. 
Henri Quatre. 
Charles V. of Spain. 
Duke of Wellington. 
Canute. 

Gonzalo de Cordova (the Great Captain. ) 
William III. 
Sir W. Wallace. 



* Supposed to be Sesostris, the Shishac of Scripture, 
at all events a great warrior as appears from Egyptian 
sculptures, from which his Nose is ascertained. 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 31 

Robert Bruce. 

Queen Elizabeth. 

Edward I. 

Columbus. 

Sir Francis Drake. 

Cortez. 

Pizarro. 

Washington. 

Henry VII. 

Cato the Censor. 

Earl of Chatham. 

The well-known, because (as their Noses 
likewise attest) strongly-marked, characters of 
these persons makes it unnecessary to allude 
even briefly to their biographies. Their names 
are sufficient to bring at once before the mind 
their energetic, persevering and determined 
characters. They were persons whom no hard- 
ships could deter, no fears daunt, no affections 
turn aside from any purpose which they had 
undertaken ; that purpose being (from the 
absence of the Cogitative) always of a physical 
character ; and (from the absence of the Greek) 
always pursued with a stern and reckless dis- 



32 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

regard of their own and others' physical ease 
and welfare. Their successes were attained by 
energy and perseverance, not by forethought and 
deep scheming. They were not the men of the 
closet, but of the field. Physical action, not 
mental activity, was their adopted road to 
success. For this reason, and because history 
is little more than a chronicle of physical 
action, wars and bloodshed, the owners of 
Roman Noses occupy the largest portion of their 
fellow-men's thoughts and of the historical 
page. 

The ancients acknowledged the foregoing 
Nasal Classification, for they represented Jupiter, 
Hercules, Minerva bellatrix, and other energetic 
Deities with Roman Noses, while they gave pure 
Greek Noses to the more refined Apollo, 
Bacchus, Juno, Venus, &c. The debased and 
unintellectual Fawn and Satyr they pourtrayed 
with Snub or Celestial Noses ; thus imparting 
to their countenances the low cunning or bestial 
inanity appropriate to those mythological inven- 
tions. 

It must not, however, be inferred from the 
majority of warriors' names in the above list, 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 



33 



that the Roman Nose necessarily indicates a 
warrior. 

These names are only selected because they 
afford well-known and easily verifiable instances, 
requiring neither pictorial nor biographical illus- 
tration. Energy may be equally conspicuous in 
any other department of life, and display itself as 
fully in the civilian as in the warrior. Two of 
the individuals adduced are striking instances of 
this. They were men of remarkable parallelism 
of character, and, though differing in other facial 
features, their Noses were very similar. Cato 
the Censor and the Earl of Chatham. 




CATO, THE CENSOR. 

(From a gem in the Florentine Museum.) 



The events of their early life — those events 

c 3 



34 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

which always bear most clearly the impress of 
the mind, because actuated by choice and not by 
circumstances, or regard to consequences — were 
almost identical. They both entered the army 
in youth, and both quitted it for the Senate. 
Here each displayed those powers of eloquence 
which raised them to the highest eminence, and 
will transmit their names to the latest posterity. 
Its peculiar feature was that energetic, powerful, 
and determined vehemence of language, which 
takes the mind prisoner and carries the judg- 
ment with it by storm. It was irresistible. 
Before it all minds of less power, though of 
greater intellect and activity, recoiled. The 
orations of Cato are unhappily lost. But 
Cicero, a master of eloquence, and well enabled 
to compare them with similar compositions, 
passes upon them the highest eulogiums. The 
eloquence of Cato has been compared for its 
force and energy to the eloquence of that Demos- 
thenes before whom Philip of Macedon quailed, 
and w 7 hose tremendous orations have given the 
name of Philippics to all sarcastic and vehe- 
ment invectives. Of Chatham's eloquence, it 
has been said by Wilkes; " Nothing could 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE, 35 

withstand the force of that contagion. The 
fluent Murray has faltered, and even Fox shrunk 
back appalled from an adversary i fraught with 
fire unquenchable/ if I may borrow the expres- 
sion of our great Milton. He had not the 
correctness of language so striking in the great 
Roman orator ; but he had the verba ardentia, 
the bold glowing words/' 

Cato led victorious armies into the field, 
and proved himself an able general; for in 
Rome the functions of the general and the 
statesman were united in the person of the 
Consul. 

It became not, however, the Secretary of State 
to lead armies in person ; but while Chatham 
administered the affairs of this country, " victory 
crowned the British arms wherever they 
appeared, both on sea and land; and the four 
years of the second administration of Mr. Pitt, 
are four of the most glorious years in the history 
of the eighteenth century."* 

In their retirement they were alike; for 
neither regarded with complacency the pursuits 

* Pict. Hist, of England. 



36 OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 

of literature ; they required some physical activity 
in their very idleness, and gardening was the 
favourite occupation of both. Cato displayed 
his disregard and even hatred for literary 
refinement by advising the Senate to dismiss 
the Grecian Ambassador Carneades promptly, 
lest his eloquence should corrupt the Roman 
youth with a love for Greek learning and 
philosophy. 

He cultivated his farm and garden with 
great skill, and wrote a work on the subject, 
entitled " De Rustica." Chatham was a land- 
scape gardener of no mean pretensions. He 
assisted Lord Lyttleton in laying out the 
celebrated park and grounds at Hagley ; and 
Bishop Warburton eulogizes his skill in gar- 
dening as inimitable, and far superior to that 
of the professor Capability Brown. Xot 
even obedience to the King's mandate could 
draw Chatham from his country retirement at 
Hayes. 

Neither ever thought he had done serving 
his country while life lasted, even when bodilv 
health and strength were gone. At eighty-four 
years of age Cato went on an embassy to Car- 



OF THE ROMAN NOSE. 37 

thage ; and Chatham, worn out by the gout and 
wrapped in flannels, never neglected to take his 
seat in the House and electrify it with his 
eloquence when any important question affecting 
the interests of the country or the liberty of the 
subject arose. 

Notwithstanding their many virtues, they 
were both coarse-minded, violent men ; proud, 
self-willed, and regardless of the common 
courtesies and even decencies of society. Both 
were perhaps indebted for some of their fame 
to the successful practice of the vice which has 
been happily designated, as the deference paid 
to virtue. 

It is not, therefore, only in the peculiar 
circumstances of his death that Chatham 
resembles Cato, with whom he has therein been 
frequently compared. 

It will be remembered that after Cato's return 
from Carthage, (the inveterate enemy and most 
powerful rival of Rome,) Cato, then in the 
eighty-fifth year of his age, and the last year of 
his life, never spoke in the Senate without 
expressing his conviction of the dangerous 
power of Carthage, and concluding with the 



38 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. "* 

celebrated words u Belenda est Carthago'' 
Chatham, when peace with America was 
proposed on terms which he thought dishon- 
? ourable to his country, expended his last 
strength in opposing it, and fell, to survive 
but a few hours, senseless on the floor of the 
House of Lords. 

As by far the majority of persons have com- 
pound Noses, and as their consideration will 
therefore throw additional light upon the system, 
we shall add a few observations upon some of 
them. 

The Roman Nose may be compounded with 
Classes II. and III., rarely with IV. ; seldom or 
never with V. and VI.* 

Compound -^. — The Romano-Greek Nose.f 

The following are instances of Noses of this 
sub-class : — 



* The indications of I. being so decidedly opposed to 
those of V. and VI., it seems almost impossible for them 
to be associated. 

t The class placed first in these compounds is that 
which predominates. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 39 

Alexander the Great. 

Constantine. 

Wolsey. 

Richelieu. 

Ximenes. 

Lorenzo de Medici. 

Frederick II. of Prussia. 

Alfred. 

Sir W. Raleigh. 

Sir P. Sidney. 

Napoleon. 

Associated with much physical energy (I.), 
these persons all exhibited much refinement 
of mind, a love for Arts and Letters, con- 
siderable astuteness and capacity of schem- 
ing; (II.) they saw far and quickly, though 
deficient in deep philosophical powers of 
thought. 

A rather more extended notice of some of the 
members of the sub-classes will be requisite ; as, 
of course, their characters were less developed, and 
therefore less known, than those of the pure 
Classes ; but principally in order to point out the 
more minute touches and, apparently, inconsisten- 



40 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 



cies of character which illustrate the compound 
form of Nose. 




COXSTANTINE. 

(From a gem in the Florentine Museum.) 

Const antine, having by a felicitous union of 
enterprise and cunning, procured his elevation to 
the Imperial throne, and having defeated the 
last of his rivals to that splendid dignity, directed 
his attention to the concentration rather than 
the extension of his enormous empire, and 
sought, by building Constantinople, to divert the 
minds of the people from foreign war and 
intestine discord ; while he at the same time 
fostered and encouraged the arts by the magni- 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 41 

ficent decoration of the new capital, to which he 
brought from Asia and Greece some of their 
most splendid productions. 

Vigorous in war and active in peace, Con- 
stantine united all the characteristics of the 
Roman and the Greek. In war he successfully 
opposed both civil and foreign enemies, and made 
himself master of the most extended empire 
Rome had ever designated by her name. While 
in the vigour of his age, he moved with slow 
dignity, or with active vigilance, according to the 
various exigencies of peace and war, along the 
frontiers of his extensive dominions, and was 
always prepared to take the field either against 
a foreign or a domestic enemy. 

But when he had gradually reached the 
summit of prosperity and the decline of life, he 
became sensible of the ambition of founding a 
city which might perpetuate the glory of his 
name, and he then exhibited all the capacities for 
the enjoyment of the luxuries of peace which 
had hitherto lain dormant in his mind. The 
mere building and fortifying a city, which would 
have satisfied the ambition of the coarser-minded 
Roman, was not his ambition only. He desired 



42 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

to decorate it with the highest efforts of human 
genius, and make it not only a monument of his 
military prowess, but also of his taste and refine- 
ment. For this purpose he founded schools of 
architecture to supply the disparity which his 
fine taste detected between the degenerate 
artists of his time and those of early Greece. 
The immortal productions of Phidias and 
Lysippus were dragged from other countries to 
adorn his capital ; and, unmindful of the injus- 
tice, he despoiled the cities of Greece and Asia of 
their most valuable ornaments. The trophies of 
memorable wars, the objects of religious venera- 
tion, the most finished statues of the gods and 
heroes, of the sages and poets of ancient times 
contributed to the splendid triumph of Constan- 
tinople.* 

The character of Wolsey was very similar 
to that of Constantine. We might almost 
venture to assert that had he been placed in the 
same situation he would have pursued the same 
course. Yet the only part of their physiogno- 



* Gibbon. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 43 

mies which assimilates axe their Noses. One 
remarkable circumstance in the early life of 
each identifies the two men and exhibits in 
them the union of energy with acute tact. 
Constantine, half assured of his elevation to the 
Imperial throne, if he could join his father's 
army and be present with him in case of his 
death, and having with difficulty obtained per- 
mission to visit his father from Galerius, (who 
dreaded the same event, and delayed the per- 
mission, until he believed it would be impossi- 
ble for him to accomplish his object), travelled 
post through Bithynia, Dacia, Thracia, Pan- 
nonia, Italy and Gaul with such speed that 
he reached Boulogne in the very moment when 
his father was preparing to embark for 
Britain, accompanied him, and finally, by 
military election, succeeded to his share of the 
Empire. 

When Henry VII. was looking out in his 
old age for a rich wife, he despatched Wolsey, 
to whom the vista of future eminence was just 
opening, to Flanders to treat for the hand of a 
Princess of the Empire. Wolsey, conscious 
that in such affairs old age brooks no delay, 



44 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE, 

started on his journey and had returned before 
the King knew that he was gone. By similar 
energy and shrewd scheming in pursuit of his 
own aggrandizement, very analogous to that by 
which Constantine secured the purple, Wolsey 
elevated himself to the highest station in his 
country, and then directed his mind rather to 
the extension of learning, the encouragement of 
art, the erection of splendid buildings, and the 
increase of domestic magnificence, than to an 
imitation of the warlike pursuits of the ances- 
tors of his monarch ; although the disposition of 
the latter strongly tended in that more physi- 
cally energetic direction. The noble hall and 
chapel at Hampton Court and the remains of 
the colleges which Wolsey founded, still attest 
his magnificence, his taste, his liberality and 
his respect for learning. 

Richelieu w 7 as another Wolsey. It is a 
remarkable fact that the point of identity in 
actively seeking their own aggrandizement, 
which has been noticed between Wolsey and 
Constantine, occurs also in the early life of 
Richelieu. Having, from interested motives, 
abandoned the army (for which he was originally 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 45 

destined) for the Church, and the Pope having 
refused, on account of his extreme youth, to 
sanction his elevation to the Bishopric for the 
sake of which he had taken orders, he resolved 
to overcome this difficulty in person ; and setting 
off for Rome, gave the Pontiff such convincing 
proofs of his talents that he was consecrated 
Bishop forthwith at twenty-two years of age, 
and thus laid the foundation of his future emi- 
nence. 

He conducted in person the siege of Rochelle, 
and baffled the finest military geniuses of 
Europe ; he out-intrigued the ablest diplomatists ; 
he nourished arts and commerce, and for the 
better promotion of learning he founded the 
French Academy. 

In the union of energy of character and 
refinement of tastes the three celebrated Car- / 
dinal- ministers of England, France, and Spain, 
strongly assimilated. gjt ** 

The anecdotes which have been related of the 
energetic carving out of their own fortunes by 
Constantine, Wolsey and Richelieu, find also 
their parallel in the early career of Ximenes. 
The son of noble parents, but without wealth 



46 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

or patronage, he had nothing but his talents 
and the energy of his character to carry him 
successfully through life. He began as a 
student at Salamanca ; but finding that sphere 
too limited for his ambition, he undertook a 
journey to Rome, where he soon distinguished 
himself as an advocate, but preferring the 
Church, took holy orders. 

Sixtus IV. had bestowed upon him the rever- 
sionary grant of the first benefice which should 
fall vacant in Spain. This proved to be Uceda ; 
and, on the demise of the incumbent, he pro- 
duced his letters, and took possession with such 
promptitude and despatch that he baffled the 
Archbishop of Toledo, who considered the bene- 
fice to be in his gift, and had promised it to one 
of his dependants. 

Like Richelieu he took the field in person, 
and in spite of the jealousy of the King, the 
dissensions of the generals, and the mutiny of 
the soldiers, he succeeded in taking the town 
of Oran on the coast of Barbary ; the first suc- 
cess of any moment which the Spanish army 
could boast in a campaign of four years' dura- 
tion, 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 47 

He devoted himself, in after life, to the en- 
couragement of popular education and the 
advancement of higher learning, in no less 
degree than his brother Cardinals before 
named. He founded a school for the educa- 
tion of the daughters of the poorer nobility, 
and subsequently provided them with marriage 
portions. 

He established the University of Alcala, 
richly endowed it, and filled its professorial 
chairs with the most distinguished learned men 
of Europe. Here he undertook the magnificent 
work, known as the Complutensian Bible. It 
was the first Polyglott Bible ever published, and 
as such affords a striking contrast to the other- 
wise undeviating opposition which Spain has 
offered to the spread of true Christianity and 
the circulation of the Scriptures. 

It should, however, be remembered that even 
this was a sealed book to the laity, since it did 
not comprise a version in the vernacular. It 
contained the Old Testament in the Hebrew, the 
Septuaguint, the Vulgate of St. Jerome, and the 
Chaldee Paraphrase with Latin translations, and 
the New Testament in the Greek and Vulgate. 



48 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. "* 

It was the work of fifteen years, and when 
the last volume was brought to Ximenes, shortly 
before his death, he exclaimed : " Many high 
and difficult matters have I carried on for the 
State, yet is there nothing which I have done, 
that deserves higher congratulations than this 
edition of the Scriptures ; the fountain-head of 
our holy religion, whence may flow purer 
streams of theology than those which have been 
turned off from it." The whole cost of the 
work, fifty thousand gold crowns, was defrayed 
by Ximenes. 

In Lorenzo di Medici, we meet with 
another of those characters, frequent among 
men eminent in public affairs, which unite 
refinement of taste with physical energy. To 
live in the world's eye with success, it is neces- 
sary to exhibit something ad captandum vulgus. 
There must either be the intense energy of the 
Roman, or the more moderate energy with the 
taste and magnificence of the Romano- Greek. 
Hence, while the former class of Nose prevails 
among those who have won fame and honours 
by arms merely, the latter is frequent among 
those who are chiefly celebrated for their states- 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 49 

manship. But both energy and statesmanship 
were necessary to him who would secure a 
world's fame as ruler of a petty Italian State. 
The head of a State too weak to be feared in 
war, and too turbulent to be governed in 
calm tranquillity, required some other qualities 
besides energy, in order to be respected and 
honoured by his cotemporaries. These qualities 
were happily united in Lorenzo di Medici. 
Firm in danger, prompt in action, lavish in 
expenditure, refined in taste, accomplished in 
learning, expert in art, he was every way 
formed to win laurels in an age which boasted 
the greatest statesmen, the best artists, and 
the most profound scholars. The vigour and 
promptitude with which he repelled the cele- 
brated conspiracy of the Pazzi family, hanged 
an Archbishop on the spot in full -canonicals, 
and punished the conspirators, alone attests his 
energy. The title of Magnificent which he 
earned in an age celebrated for its magnificence, 
demonstrates his lavish liberality; while his 
love for antiquities, his patronage of the arts 
of sculpture and painting, his studious devotion 
to learning and the writings of the ancients, 

D 



50 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE."' 

bespeak the refinement of his mind. Among 
other institutions, he founded a school for the 
study of antiquities and furnished it with the 
finest specimens of ancient workmanship. " To 
this institution, more than to any other circum- 
stance, we may, without any hesitation, ascribe 
the sudden and astonishing proficiency, which, 
towards the close of the fifteenth century, was 
evidently made in the arts, and which, com- 
mencing at Florence, extended itself to the rest 
of Europe. 

" ' It is highly deserving of notice,' says 
Vasari, ' that all those who studied in the 
gardens of the Medici, and were favoured by 
Lorenzo, became most excellent artists, which 
can only be attributed to the exquisite judgment 
of this great patron of their studies.' " # 

Frederick II. is another example of the union 
of refined tastes with vigorous energy. It is not 
so much for his military genius that he is to be 
remembered and respected, as for the impulse 
he gave to Prussian intellect, and thence gene- 
rally to German mind. 



* Roscoe's Life of L. di Medici. Chap. ix. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 51 

It is true this was hardly perceptible till the 
present century, for until the peace of 1815, 
Germany had been the seat of almost incessant 
warfare, and was, therefore, disabled from 
pursuing the arts of peace with success. But 
thirty years' peace has enabled her to perform 
great things, and to justify a pretty sure hope 
of yet greater. We ought to be far in advance 
of her, for where she now is we were exactly 
two hundred and fifty years and upwards ago. 
Till the reign of Elizabeth, England had been, 
like Germany till 1815, the seat of perpetual 
war or religious discord. At the end of the 
sixteenth century in England, and at the begin- 
ning of the nineteenth in Germany, the Teuto- 
nic mind began to develop itself with effect. 
The same deep investigations in history, the 
same subtle disquisitions in metaphysics, the 
same love of philological criticism that distin- 
guished English literature in the early part of 
the seventeenth ' century belong to German 
literature in the nineteenth, and are combined 
with the same coarseness of manners that 
marked our ancestors. The Germans, still 
delight in those rude, indecent productions, 

D 2 



52 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

called Miracle - plays or Mysteries,* which 
amused the predecessors of Shakspere : legalized 
wager of battle, semi-feudalism, masks of fools 
dancing in a gigantic beer-barrel and chanting 
the praises of beer, deer-battues, perpetual 
duelling and beer-swigging, millions pilgrim- 
aging to the Coat of Treves, the implicit 
reception of sham Miracles, all mark a 
state of society little removed from that 
magnificent barbarism which stained the rush- 
strewn court of the ear-boxing and swearing 
Elizabeth. 

In refinement, and that wealth which springs 
from Science, we have advanced far beyond 
Germany ; but in that wealth which emanates 
from Mind we are only on a par with her. The 
causes of this will be considered more fully 
hereafter, when we treat under Class III. of the 
causes of the decline of Wisdom. 

The impulse given to German mind may in 



* See Hone's description of one performed in IS 15 
before several crowned heads of Europe for three succes- 
sive days ; Hone on the Mysteries. See also Wilhelm 
Meister, Vol. i. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 53 

a great measure be attributed to the pains which 
Frederick II. took to civilize and educate his 
people. For this purpose he founded numerous 
popular schools, it is said as many as sixty in 
one year. He instituted an Academy of Sciences 
and fostered Universities. He patronized Com- 
merce and the Arts, and by his wise administra- 
tion as much as by his military talents raised 
Prussia to the rank of a second-rate European 
State. The military success of the correspon- 
dent of Voltaire, it is unnecessarv to do more 
than refer to. 

Machiavellism formed a strikingly distinctive 
feature in the characters of all the foregoing 
personages. They all possessed more of the 
wisdom of the serpent, than of the innocence of 
the dove. It may be thought, however, that we 
employ too strong a term in calling this 
Machiavellism. A less strict morality would 
only call it policy, worldly wisdom. In men of 
strong conscientiousness, astuteness may be little 
or nothing more ; but where the moral sense is 
weak, it easily passes into duplicity and dis- 
honest craft. 

The shrewd policy and worldly wisdom by 



54 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

which the great Alfred civilized a barbarous 
people, and tamed to quietude a nation of turbu- 
lent robbers, has never been accused of departing 
from a strict morality. It may be that he is 
somewhat indebted to the partiality of the 
monkish historians for the very flattering 
pictures of him handed down to us. The 
prompt and energetic manner in which, from 
time to time, he fell upon and defeated the 
Danes who ravaged the country is too well 
known to need mention, and the prudent means 
by which he endeavoured to incite his people to 
educate themselves has been often the subject of 
praise. In a remarkably illiterate age, he alone 
courted literature, and, conscious of its power to 
civilize his people, urged them to follow his 
example. Nevertheless, he did not forget the 
more arduous duties of a King. While devot- 
ing a large part of his time to learning, he 
never neglected the interests of his country ; nor 
suffered her liberties to be trampled upon by 
invaders while he was cultivating the arts of 
peace. His biographer, quaintly and somewhat 
poetically, describes the King's studious mind 
and gubernatorial talents. " Like a most pro- 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 55 

ductive bee, he flew here and there asking 
questions as he went, until he had eagerly and 
unceasingly collected many various flowers of 
Divine Scriptures, with which he thickly stored 
the cells of his mind. His friends would 
voluntarily sustain little or no toil, though it was 
for the common necessity of the kingdom ; but 
he alone, sustained by the divine aid, like a 
skilful pilot, strove to steer his ship laden 
with much wealth, into the safe and much- 
desired harbour of his country though almost 
all his crew were tired, and suffered them 
not to faint or hesitate, though sailing among 
the manifold waves and eddies of this present 
life."* 

The circumstances in which men are involun- 
tarily placed marvellously affect their actions. 
Crowd together a number of young trees in 
one small plot, and how slowly they grow, 
how stunted they become ! Remove them to 
separate stations, where their roots may spread, 
their branches expand, and their leaves drink 
freely of the sun and air, and how soon 

* Asser's Life of Alfred. 



56 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

they take their place among the giants of 
the forest. So it is with men. Crowded in 
cities, undistinguished by birth, and unassisted 
by patronage, many a hero dies unseen and 
unnoticed — 

" Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast, 
The little tyrant of his fields withstood ; 

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest, 

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood." 

Let it not, therefore, be imagined, from the 
foregoing instances, that every Greco-Roman 
Nose indicates an energetic statesman, or a 
literary monarch ; or that the same actions are 
to be predicated from the same form of 
Nose in different men under different circum- 
stances. 

Energy and refinement may exist in every 
department of life. The peasant may furnish 
as illustrious an example of either as the Prince. 
But what a King has, these heroes want ; 
and so they die unhonoured for lack of a 
record. The illustrations are, therefore, neces- 
sarily drawn from the high and mighty of various 
spheres. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 57 

Stars of lesser magnitude, however, present 
themselves to shed a further light upon the 
subject. 

Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip 
Sidney were two men whose characters exhibited 
many points of identity. 

In any arduous enterprize which promised 
fame and honour, Sir Walter Raleigh was 
always prominent. Eager to support the 
Reformation, he served in the Protestant army 
as a volunteer during the civil wars in France, 
and afterwards tendered his services to the 
Netherlands in their contest with Spain for 
civil and religious liberty. One of the most 
attractive enterprizes of the reign of Elizabeth 
to men of energy and forethought was, however, 
that presented by the recently-opened field of 
American discovery. Into this Raleigh threw 
himself heart and soul. With his half-brother, 
Sir Humphrey Gilbert, he made the then 
perilous voyage to the New World, but failed 
to establish a firm footing on its shores. 

Still he was not to be thus foiled. After a 
careful consideration of the best authorities, he 

d 3 



58 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

came to the just conclusion that there was 
land north of the Gulf of Florida, a tract 
then wholly unexplored. Having obtained 
from the Queen the inexpensive grant of all 
he might discover, be it sea or be it land, be 
it inhabited or be it void, he fitted out vessels 
of discovery ; and, though not permitted by 
the wary Queen to accompany them him- 
self, they verified his predictions by discov- 
ering the country now called Virginia — a name 
which the virgin Queen herself bestowed 
upon it. 

But it was not by his energy that Raleigh 
alone distinguished himself. The young Pro- 
testant volunteer, and the American adventurer 
would long since have been forgotten among a 
host of compeers, had not he presented far 
higher claims to the notice of posterity. 
" Raleigh was one of those rare men who 
seem qualified to excel in all pursuits alike ; 
and his talents were set off by an extraordinary 
laboriousness, and capacity of application. [j~), 
As a navigator, soldier, statesman, and historian. 
his name is intimately and honourably linked 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 59 

with one of the most brilliant periods of British 
history."* 

Sir Walter Raleigh occupies a distinguished 
place in literature, both as a poet and an 
historian. It is probable that only a small 
portion of his poetry has come down to us. 
He seems to have regarded it but lightly 
himself, and many very beautiful pieces, which 
there is no reason to doubt owe their origin 
to his creative brain, are without name, and only 
preserved in some obscure miscellaneous collec- 
tions, under the modest signature ' Ignoto/ One 
of these, sometimes entitled " The Lie," and 
sometimes " The Soul's Errand," is as beautiful, 
as Christian, and as philosophic a poem as any 
in the language; yet so little pains did he 
take to secure to himself the literary fame of 
the words with which he had relieved his 
labouring soul, that it has been attributed to 
divers poetasters, and, among others, to that 
most w T retched inharmonious scribe, Joshua 
Sylvester. 



* Life of Raleigh, 6 Port. Gal. p. 10. 



60 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. "* 

Spenser eulogizes Raleigh's poetic powers as 
those of one 

" . . . . as skilful in that art as any."* 

He likewise entitles him ' the summer's nightin- 
gale/ and hints that he had in store a poem on 
Queen Elizabeth, which might rival " The Faerie 
Queene :" — 

" To taste the streames, that like a golden showre, 

Flow from thy fruitful head, of thy Love's praise — 

Fitter perhaps to thunder martial stowre — 

When so thee list thy lofty Muse to raise ; 

Yet till that thou thy poem wilt make known, 

Let thy faire Cynthia's praises be thus rudely shown." 

But poetic effusions are not the only con- 
tributions of Raleigh to literature. During his 
long confinement in the Tower, on charge of 
treason, he relieved his solitude by compiling a 
" History of the World ;" an undertaking 
sufficient to appal the most active and learned 
man under the most favourable circumstances, 
but which appears something superhuman when 

* Colin Clout. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 61 

attempted and almost accomplished by a wretched 
prisoner lying under an unjust sentence of 
death. 

This History commences at the Creation, and 
descends as far as the end of the second 
Macedonian War; when, in consequence of 
the death of Prince Henry, for whose instruction 
it was intended, he ceased from his arduous 
labours. The work displays a vast extent of 
reading in history, philosophy, theology and 
Rabbinical learning. 

Like Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney combined 
the characters of the warrior and the author. 
His Arcadia was a work of poetic prose, better 
suited to the time in which he lived than to 
any subsequent period, and is almost forgotten ; 
and the stiffness and hard formality of his 
poetry has almost sunk it in like oblivion. A 
writer who is not an author for all time, may 
be a very useful and agreeable one in his day, 
but lacks power and thoughtfulness. It is only 
those who have the "one touch of Nature 
which makes the whole world kin," that are 
independent of time, and live with the kindred 
spirits of all ages. 



62 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

Time puts out the lesser lights which burn 
only to light some small apartment and corner 
of the world, but cannot extinguish the suns 
which are formed to illuminate the whole 
earth. 

Sir Philip Sidney was rather a discerning 
patron of letters than a man of letters. He was 
the first patron and friend of Spenser, whom he 
introduced to the Queen, and their friendship 
endured till Sidney's lamented death. Perhaps 
in the whole range of literary history, there is 
no incident so beautiful as the mutual friendship 
and familiar intercourse of Raleigh, Spenser and 
Sidney. This pleasing friendship is frequently 
alluded to by Spenser. The ' Faerie Queene 5 is 
dedicated to Raleigh, whose return from his 
Western Expedition is celebrated in the Pastoral 
entitled, " Colin Clout's come home again ;" 
from which we learn that it was their custom to 
recline 

" . . . . amongst the coolly shade 
Of the green alders by the Mulla's shore.' 

and recite to each other their poetic effusions. 
How beautiful a picture of the simplicity ot 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 63 

great minds ! It strikes us as a more lovely 
picture than the much-admired one of Chaucer, 
solitary among the daisies of the Woodstock 
meadows. 

Sidney inspired Spenser with no mere 
mercenary friendship, the affection of the client 
for his patron's substantial marks of favour. 
When death smote Sidney on the sad field of 
Zutphen, Spenser invoked every Muse to weep 
over his untimely fall, and celebrated his virtues 
in the beautiful elegy " The Tears of the 
Muses for Astrophel." It will perhaps relieve 
the dryness of our subject, to observe that the 
first poetical use of the Forget-me-not, fMyosotis 
palustrisj as a symbol of faithfulness, occurs in 
this poem, and the English reader may there 
find a more fitting reason to esteem this little 
flower than the absurd German legend of a 
drowning knight throwing a spray of it to his 
ladye-love. 

The Astrophel of the following lines from 
Spenser's Elegy, is Sidney ; Stella is the name 
by which Sidney addressed his Mistress, who, 
it is feigned, was unable to survive his loss, 
and, 



64 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

" . . . . followed her mate, like turtle chaste, 
To prove that death their hearts cannot divide, 
Which, living, were in love so firmly tied. 

" The Gods which all things see, this same beheld ; 

And pittying this paire of lovers trew, 

Transformed them, there lying on the field, 

Into one flowre that is both red and blew. 

It first growes red, and then to blew doth fade, 
Like Astrophel, which thereinto was made. 

" And in the midst thereof a starre appeares, 

As fairly formed as any starre in skyes, 

Resembling Stella in her freshest yeeres, 

Forth darting beames of beautie from her eyes ; 
And all the day it standeth full of deow, 
Which is the teares, that from her eyes did flow. 

" That hearb of some, Starlight is call'd by name, 

Of others, Penthia, though not so well ; 

But thou, whenever thou dost find the same, 

From this day forth doe call it Astrophel. 
And whensoever thou it up doost take, 
Doe pluck it softly for that shepheard's sake." 

May the injunction of the last lines never 
be forgotten by any one who knows that 
the forget-me-not is associated with the friend- 
ship of two such noble-minded men ! 

It is hardly necessary to say that Sir Philip 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 65 

Sidney fell gallantly fighting at the battle of 
Zutphen, or to narrate the interesting anecdote 
of his refusing a drink of cold water till a 
wounded soldier had partaken of it, saying, 
" Thy necessity is yet greater than mine ;" thus 
nobly displaying both firm endurance and sensitive 
humanity. 

The other instances, xAxexander the Great 
and Napoleon, may be best treated of by 
contrasting them with their opposites ; and we 
shall thus be enabled to illustrate, at the same 
time, both the Roman and the Greek Noses 
more fully. Moreover, while the contrast will 
clearly demonstrate the distinctive characteristics 
of those Noses, it will also evince how important 
it is to attend to compound forms, and how 
materially the character is affected by the inter- 
mixture of classes. 

Of all the conquerors whose wild ambition 
has stained with blood the page of History, 
Alexander and Napoleon alone fought from a 
high romantic motive — the desire of eternal 
fame. By virtue of a large share of the Roman 
Nose, they pursued their favourite and chosen 
career with determined energy and a reckless 



66 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

disregard for the lives of others; nevertheless, 
being strongly gifted with the Greek, they 
might in some other sphere have been high 
artists of some class ; but having the sword in 
their hands they pursued intellectual fame by its 
means. 

It is difficult to say whether the Roman or 
the Greek form predominates in their noses ; for 
they are perhaps as much Greco-Roman as 
Romano-Greek; but as they were w r arriors, 
we place them here because it will be ad- 
vantageous to draw an illustrative contrast 
between their characters and noses, and the 
characters and noses of too many other 
mere conquerors, whose noses have been purely 
Roman. 

Let us briefly contrast Julius Caesar and 
Alexander. They were both, in the prime of 
life, placed at the head of a large empire, firmly 
seated, with a large army and all the world open 
to their grasp. Their Noses alone differed. 
Alexander while pursuing everlasting fame by 
his arms, and earning what was then deemed the 
highest glory, steadily devoted himself to the 
extension of scientific knowledge. Under his 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 



67 



revered master Aristotle, he acquired much 
learning, and, when he ascended his father's 
throne, devoted his arms as much to the con- 
quest of the then unknown realms of science as 
of the kingdoms of the earth. His army was 
always accompanied by learned men, whose sole 




JULIUS CAESAR. * ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 

(From gems in the Florentine Museum. J 



duty it was to investigate the history, religion, 
and arts of the countries he passed through, to 
collect rare animals and plants, statues, coins, 
and objects of art or curiosity to be transmitted 
to Greece for the study of his master Aristotle. 
It has been well said, "If there had been 



68 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

no Alexander, there would have been no 
Aristotle." We do not laud the man who 
sought glory by the destruction of others, but 
merely assert that, as these acts prove, his 
motive to arms was a high intellectual one, 
and consistent with the compound character of 
his Nose. 

Look at Julius Caesar on the other hand. 
Under similar circumstances, what was his 
ambition ? To make himself imperial master of 
Rome, and to subject his fellow-citizens for his 
own personal aggrandizement. His thoughts 
never extended beyond his own petty existence. 
Posterity never entered into his calculations. 
Unlike his successor Augustus — though he had 
greater facilities if he had been less sensually 
ambitious — he patronized no art — literary or 
scientific. His one idea was self, without one 
refinement or softening alloy. Granted that 
Alexander's ambition was also selfish, there was 
yet this difference between them ; the one 
(Caesar) sought only his present personal and 
sensuous profit ; the other (Alexander) laboured 
to earn " a name on History's page to make 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 69 

him l Great/ " The one was the common 
prose, the other the epic poem. The one 
sacrificed his fame to himself, the other 
himself to his fame ; and the world has recog- 
nized and recorded this distinction ; for while 
the one is remembered as "the enslaver of 
his country/' the other is immortalized as " the 
Great." 

A similar contrast may be drawn between the 
characters and noses of the two modern heroes, 
Napoleon and Wellington. Like Alexander 
and Caesar, the only point in which their 
characters assimilate is their warrior, physical 
energy ; and this exhibits itself in whatever 
is Roman in their Noses. In all other 
respects they are diametrically opposite ; the 
Nose of Wellington being purely (almost 
in excess) Roman ; while Napoleon's par- 
takes largely of the refining qualities of the 
Greek. 

To describe the character of Napoleon would 
be to repeat what we have said of Alexander ; 
for whether the similarity was accidental, or 
arose 'from mental conformity (their Noses were 
remarkably alike), or was intentionally imitative 



70 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

on the part of the former,* it is certainly most 
striking. 

Ambition of future fame was far more the 
ruling passion of Napoleon than lust of present 
power. His mind, with all its imperfections 
and meannesses (as whose is without?), was 
too noble to be satisfied with mere personal 
aggrandizement. 

All the great mistakes of his life were 
occasioned by his obedience to the passion for 
future fame. When swayed by the mere 
desire of power, all his acts were successful. As 
General, Consul, or Dictator, Napoleon never 
made one false step ; but when he became 
Emperor, when he saw all Europe (except one 
little pugnacious island) lying helpless at his feet, 
he began to revolve schemes which could not 
enhance, but might risk, his personal power. 
Then he attempted to realize his long-cherished 
dream of Eastern conquest — a conquest not to 
be held, but to be overrun ; a conquest like that 

* If Napoleon was an imitator of Alexander, it was 
only another point of identity between them ; for 
Alexander was an imitator of Bacchus. 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 7i 

of Alexander, Nadir Shah, or Kinghis Khan. 
Often and often did he exclaim, " the seat of all 
fame is the east." To realize this empty fame, 
he took the false step of invading Egypt. 
Foiled there, he still hoped to penetrate Asia by 
land, and gathered all his strength to overwhelm 
Russia, his last and greatest error. They 
greatly err who think these were mere schemes 
to keep France embroiled, lest peace should 
annihilate his power. They equally err who 
ridicule and attribute to a childish vanity his 
ambition to link himself by marriage with the 
imperial families of Europe. It was no childish 
vanity, but a politic endeavour to found a 
dynasty, which should hand down his name as 
its founder to the latest ages. They again who 
can see nothing better in the melancholy 
spectacle of Napoleon at St. Helena, engaged in 
falsifying records and altering figures to deceive 
the world, but a drivelling vanity, utterly mis- 
comprehend the man. Fame, fame to the 
utmost limits of human duration was to his last 
moment his highest ambition. Foiled in every 
thing else, he yet hoped to secure fame. He 
knew that under his name the most eventful 



72 OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 

page in the History of Europe, since the fall of 
Rome, must be written, and he naturally 
desired 

" To be among the worthies of renown, 

And so sit fair with fame, with glory bright. " 

DANIEL. 

To describe the character of Wellington, is to 
reverse that of Napoleon. Napoleon was 
shrewd, artful, and deceitful ; Wellington open- 
hearted, strong-sensed, candid and sincere. 
Napoleon a clever statesman ; Wellington 
obtuse in politics. Napoleon a great strategist ; 
Wellington short-sighted, though daring, in the 
field. Napoleon a lover and patron of arts ; 
Wellington a despiser of them. Napoleon said 
to be personally timid ; Wellington constitu- 
tionally brave. Napoleon's cruelties were acts 
of cool calculation and state-policy; Welling- 
ton's of military fury. Napoleon poisoned his 
prisoners because he did not know what else to 
do with them, and murdered the Duke 
d'Enghein to produce " an effect" in Europe; 
Wellington's cruelties were the necessary con- 
sequences of war energetically carried on, and 



OF THE ROMANO-GREEK NOSE. 73 

were never the result of cold-blooded predeter- 
mination. 

Before closing this section, we would request 
the reader's attention to the strong proof of the 
truth of the hypothesis derivable from the fact 
that like Noses, with like circumstances, {cceteris 
paribus, as the phrenologists say) produce like 
characters: for instance, Wolsey, Richelieu, 
Ximenes, Lorenzo di Medici, Alfred: — Sidney, 
Raleigh : — Alexander, Napoleon. 



/ 



CHAPTER III. 

OF THE GREEK NOSE. 

Class II. — The Greek, or straight Nose, isperfectly 
straight ; any deviation from a right line must be 
strictly noticed. If the deviation tend to convexity, 
it approaches the Roman, and the character is im- 
proved by an accession of energy ; on the other hand, 
when the deviation is towards concavity, it partakes of 
the Celestial, and the character is weakened. It 
should be fine and well chiselled, but not sharp. 

It indicates Refinement of character ; love for the Fine 
Arts, and Belles Lettres ; Astuteness, craft, and a pre- 
ference for indirect rather than direct action. Its 
owner is not without some energy in pursuit of that 
which is agreeable to his tastes ; but, unlike the 
owner of the Roman Nose, he cannot exert himself in 
opposition to his tastes. When associated with the 
Roman Nose, and distended slightly at the end by the 
Cogitative, it indicates the most useful and intellectual 
of characters, and is the highest and most beautiful 
form which the organ can assume. 

This Nose, like the Roman, takes its name 



OF THE GREEK NOSE. 75 

from the people of whom it was most character- 
istic — physically and mentally. On these two 
parallel facts (with others of a like kind) much 
stress may be justly laid, although they are old 
and trite. But this very triteness is the proof 
of their truth. It proves that the hypothesis 
which attributes certain mental characteristics, 
well known to belong to the Romans to the 
Roman Nose, — and so of the Greeks to the 
Greek Nose, and of the Jews to the Jewish 
Nose, — is founded in nature ; and, so far from 
being a fanciful invention, is a fact long-recog- 
nized, and as old as the creation of the human 
proboscis. 

Requesting the reader to bear in mind the 
form of the Greek Nose and its indications, we 
would remark how exactly the latter correspond 
with the character of the ancient Greeks as a 
nation. It is unnecessary to expatiate on their 
high excellence in art, their lofty philosophy, 
their acute reasoning, or their poetical inspiration 
— these are known to every school-boy. Their 
craftiness, their political falsehood, and shrewd 
deceitfulness were celebrated in ancient days as 
now, and " Grcecia mendax" " Danaum 

e 2 



76 OF THE GREEK NOSE. 

insidice" were epithets as true and as com- 
monly applied in the time of Augustus, as at 
the present hour by modern travellers. " Timeo 
Danaos et dona ferentes /" exclaims the 
cautious Priest of Troy, referring to the well- 
known character of the treacherous enemy. 
And what a contrast to anything recorded in 
Roman warfare does the Trojan War itself 
exhibit ! The Romans would have battered 
down the walls with their furious engines ; 
the wily Greeks invent a stratagem by which 
the enemy pull down their own walls. If 
we may credit Homer — and, if not for the 
facts, we may for his fine portraitures of 
Grecian character — there was a vast deal more 
talking than fighting during the ten years' 
siege. There was plenty of the morale, but 
very little of the physique, as a Frenchman 
would say. In truth, the contrast between 
the Romans and the Greeks was as great 
in the latter as in the former. 

The Greeks were no nation of hardy warriors, 
though they were always quarrelling among 
themselves in petty battles which have won 
an undeserved celebrity by the talents of their 



OF THE GREEK NOSE. 77 

historians. Were it not for the writings of 
Thucydides, the Peleponnesian War would rank 
no higher than the border skirmishes of the 
Scots and Northumbrians, or the expeditions 
of the Sioux and Pawnees. A simple geo- 
graphical fact is sufficient to prove this against 
all the moral power of the most glowing and 
eloquent historian. Greece is about one-fourth 
less than Scotland, and its recorded population 
was about the same. Is it possible that, in 
such a corner, a war of three-and-twenty years 5 
duration could be more than a series of skir- 
mishes and predatory expeditions ? More than 
that, must, in a much briefer space, have an- 
nihilated the whole population. More than 
that, and at the end of twenty-three years 
the States of Greece must have been in the 
condition of the celebrated Kilkenny cats, which 
fought till only the tip of the tail of one of 
them was left. The battles of Marathon, 
Thermopylae, &c, against foreign foes rank 
higher, because they were fought and won 
under a high intellectual inspiration, entirely 
consistent with Class II. — the love of country. 
But with these battles the war ended; the 



78 OF THE GREEK NOSE. 

Greeks did not, as the Romans would have 
done, follow up the defeat of the enemy with 
a counter-incursion into his country and an 
attempt at foreign conquest. He was driven 
from their territory ; their hearths were secure ; 
their gods replaced on their pedestals ; their 
temples re-purified, and that satisfied their 
ambition. The Greeks made no foreign con- 
quests ; boasted no extended empire. The 
wars of Alexander seem the only exception ; but 
of that Monarch himself we have already 
treated, and of his battles it may be said, 
that they were not fought by Peleponnesian 
Greeks (of whom we are now speaking) but 
by Macedonians and Asiatic mercenaries ; who 
were in all probability — though it would de- 
mand a volume on ethnography to prove it 
— a wholly different race. 

But, if we were only prepared to substan- 
tiate our hypothesis by these general facts of 
national characteristics, it would be very unsa- 
tisfactory; as it is obvious that nothing could 
be easier than to manufacture and support a 
theory by moulding it to a single general 
fact. It is by the multiplicity of isolated indi- 



OF THE GREEK NOSE. 79 

vidual cases that the hypothesis must stand 
or fall. And we are happily in a position 
again to adduce these in its favour. 

The following persons will, on an exami- 
nation of their portraits, be found to have 
possessed Greek noses : — 

Petrarch. 

Milton, (in youth.) 

Spenser. 

Byron. 

Shelley. 

Boccacio. 

Canova. 

RafFaelle. 

Claude. 

Rubens. 

Murillo. 

Titian. 

Addison. 

Voltaire. 

It will be perceived that this list (which, 
like all the others, might be very much ex- 
tended) contains the names of poets and artists 



80 OF THE GREEK NOSE. 

of the highest beauty and elegance, though 
not of the most intense and deepest thought. 




RAFFAELLE. 



Beauty is their highest excellence, their chief 
praise. Exquisite melody, aetherial fancies, fe- 
licitous expression, a fine perception of the 
Beautiful, as distinguished from the Sublime, 
whether on paper or canvass, (for it is only' 
the difference in the mecanique, or vehicle 
of expression, which constitutes the difference 
between the Artist and the Poet), are their 
best attributes. Addison and Voltaire are the 
only tw T o of the above instances who never 
excelled in Poetry or Art, though both assi- 
duously courted the former Muse. Neverthe- 
less Addison is an illustrious instance in our 



OF THE GREEK NOSE. 



81 



behalf. Is not the beauty, the correctness, the 
euphony of his style still an object of emu- 




lation? Has it not for above a century been 
the model of good writing ? And yet it is 
too true that nothing equally permanent can 
be found, which is at the same time so 
weak and tame in thought, so shallow in 
reasoning, or so lax in argument. In fact, 
it owes all its permanency to its euphony, 
its musical harmony and exactness of ex- 
pression. 

The absence of a noticeable development of 
the Cogitative (Class III.) accounts for the 
deficiency of higher qualities in these disciples 
of the Beautiful. For this reason the Greek 

E 3 



82 OF THE GREEK NOSE. 

nose is more interesting in its compound form, 
Sub-class ~. the " Greco-Cogitative" than in 
its simple form. 

Of the above instances, Voltaire is the most 
decidedly deficient in the Cogitative, which 
is always essential to indicate a capacity for the 
deep, close and serious thought requisite to 
constitute a truly great and philosophic mind. 
The angle at which his nose stood from his face 
was quite 45°, and therefore much too great to 
exhibit faithfully the higher characteristics of the 
Greek. It was, moreover, exceedingly deficient 
in the broadening property of Class III ; and 
we presume that no one will assert that Voltaire 
possessed " a truly great and philosophic mind." 
Surely no man, who ever wrote so much, and 
on such varied subjects, ever devoted less time 
to close intense thought. He did not even stop 
to examine his facts ; but, having a brilliant wit 
and " the pen of a ready writer," he rapidly 
evolved some fanciful theory, or started some 
fallacious argument from such unauthenticated 
data as he happened to be possessed of. All 
this was indicated by his sharp Greek Nose ; 
for it was acuteness, not depth ; readiness, not 



OF THE GREEK NOSE. 83 

thought ; careless unprincipled wit, not study ; 
attractive style, not sound matter, which earned 
him his short-lived fame. Hence, Voltaire, 
though striving all his life to gain the title 
of philosopher, never succeeded even in the 
most unphilosophic age and country since the 
revival of learning, and is now, we believe, 
wholly excluded from the dignity. It has been 
truly and wittily said of Voltaire, that " he half 
knew everything, ' from the cedar tree that is in 
Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that springeth 
out of the wall/ and he wrote of them all, and 
laughed at them all." 

It will be noticed that the foregoing list 
contains the name of " Milton, in youth" It 
is inserted thus, because his portrait, taken 
cetat XXIII, shows that his Nose was not then 
developed into the Cogitative form which it 
assumed in later years, when troublous times and 
anxious cares caused him to reflect profoundly 
on events around him. Then it expanded at 
the base and became, like the Noses of all the 
great men of those stirring times, largely com- 
pounded with the Cogitative ; under the 
compounds of which class it will again, at a 



84 OF THE GREEK NOSE.. 

later period of his life, appear. From this cor- 
responding change in feature with change in 
character, we might, if we thought proper, 
demand the same proof for our system which 
the phrenologists demand for theirs, from the 
gradual alteration in the skull of the boy 
Bidder; and though (as our system is, we 
conceive, better based than theirs) it is unne- 
cessary to lay as much stress upon a single fact 
as they are compelled to do, yet we think it 
right not to let this proof pass wholly without 
observation. 

Having already treated at some length of the 
Romano-Greek Nose (Sub-class =L.), it is unne- 
cessary to enlarge here upon its close ally the 
Greco-Roman ^. Of course they are some- 
what similar in appearance and character ; only 
as in every compound form, one simple one 
will generally prevail — Nature, like a bad cook, 
not always mixing her ingredients in due pro- 
portions — it is necessary to distinguish them 
into different sub-classes. 

A noticeable predominance of one form will 
at once indicate to which sub-class a Nose 
belongs, and the character will be found to be 



•OF THE GREEK NOSE. 



85 



affected accordingly. Thus a Romano-Greek 
Nose indicates a more energetic and less refined 
character than a Greco-Roman, But these 
are the minutiae of the science, with which 
it is not advisable at present to embarrass the 
reader. 




CHAPTER IV. 

OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

Class III. — The Cogitative, or Wide-nostrilled Nose, 
is, as its secondary name imports, wide at the end, 
thick and broad, not clubbed, but gradually widening 
from below the bridge. The other Noses are seen in 
profile, but this in full face. 

It indicates a Cogitative mind, having strong powers of 
Thought, and given to close and serious Meditation. 
Its indications are of course much dependent on the 
form of the Nose in profile, which decides the turn the 
Cogitative power will take. Of course it never occurs 
alone, and is usually associated with Classes I. and II. 
rarely with IV., still more seldom with V. and VI. 
The entire absence of it produces the " sharp" Nose, 
which is not classified, as sharpness is only a negative 
quality, being defect of breadth, and therefore indicates 
defect of Cogitative power. 

It is manifest that without some portion of 
the Cogitative power, i. e., the capacity of con- 



op; the cogitative nose. 87 

centrating the thoughts earnestly and powerfully 
on one focus, no character can be truly great. 
It is therefore a quality essential to high and 
durable eminence in every department of life. 
It matters not what a man's natural talents may 
be, they will be utterly useless, or worse than 
useless, if he has not schooled his mind into 
habits of concentrated thought. It is the want 
of this severe training which causes so many 1 
men of fine talents to be a burden to themselves 
and others. How frequently have we to lament 
the humiliating spectacle of a great genius — as 
the phrase is — flitting about from pursuit to pur- 
suit, without any settled end or aim; now 
attempting this thing, now dabbling in that; 
doing all things tolerably well, but nothing per- 
fectly ; aiming at everything, but holding fast 
to nothing; and merely from want of steady 
settled habits of thought ! How melancholy is 
it to reflect that the want of self-training in early 
life has converted the blessing of talents into a 
curse, and turned the fine wheat of Heaven's 
planting into the rank tares of Hell ! 

It is from beholding this too frequent spec- 
tacle that dull-pated Ignorance repeats with 



88 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

self-complacency the trite proverb, " Geniuses 
rarely do any good for themselves," professes to 
despise the talents in which he is consciously 
deficient, and thanks God that He has not 
made him a genius. 

Begone, thou muddle-pated imbecile ! and 
learn that it is not his genius which has made 
him what he is, but the want of that in which 
you equally fail — self-training. Instead of idly 
despising the noblest gift of Heaven, strive, from 
his example, to avoid the rock on which he has 
split, and endeavour by stern, close, severe 
mental discipline to elevate yourself to a frac- 
tional part of the high estate from which he has 
fallen. Pull him not down to your debasement, 
but soar upward towards the eminence which 
he has voluntarily (alas !) abandoned ; well 
assured that though you may never reach it, 
your labour will not have been in vain, and that 
you may yet place yourself tar above the level of 
the common despisers of genius. 

But to our subject — the Cogitative Nose. 
This Nose long puzzled us. We found it 
among men of all pursuits, from the warrior to 
the peaceful theologian. Noticing it more par- 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 89 

ticularly among the latter, we were at one time 
inclined to call it the religious Nose ; but further 
observation convincing us that that term was 
too limited, we were compelled to abandon it. 
We were next, from perceiving it frequent 
among scientific men, disposed to call it the 
philosophic Nose ; but this was found to be too 
confined also, as, in the modern acceptation of 
the term, it seemed to exclude the theologians, 
and we moreover traced it accompanying other 
and very different conditions of mind. It soon 
became manifest, however, that it was noticeable 
only among very first-rate men (men of the very 
highest excellence in their several departments), 
and that search must be made for some common 
property of mind which, however directed by- 
other causes, would always lead to eminence. It 
appeared to us that this property was deep, close 
Meditation, intense concentrated Thought, emi- 
nently "cogitative" in fact; and, therefore, we 
adopted this term, which permits to have in- 
cluded in it all serious thinkers, whatever the 
subject of their cogitations. 

It would be wrong to regard it as a mere 



90 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

coincidence, that, after having from deduction 
a posteriori learnt that this common property is 
exhibited in the breadth of the Nose, we find 
that if we were, a priori, to consider in which 
part of the Nose a common property was to 
be looked for, we must decide it to be in 
the breadth, for the profile is already in every 
part mapped out and appropriated to special 
properties. 

May we not hail this as one of the beautiful 
harmonious truths which spring up from time 
to time, the deeper the subject is investigated, 
to attest the accuracy of the system ? for where 
by a careful deduction, a posteriorly we discover 
the common property is, there, a priori, we 
perceive it must be in order to act in concert 
with the special properties exhibited by the 
profile. 

To entitle a Nose to rank among the Cogita- 
tives, it should be above the medium between 
the very full broad Nose and the very sharp 
thin Nose. The observation is to be confined 
to the parts below the bridge ; what may be the 
properties of breadth above the bridge we have 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 91 

not at present observed satisfactorily. It 
may be remarked as a general rule, that 
the further a Nose recedes from sharpness the 
better. 

We have said that minds of every bias are 
found accompanying Cogitative Noses, and this 
necessarily ; for the tendency of the cogitations 
will be determined by the profile. Thus the 
Cogitative acts in concert with the other Noses, 
making useful those qualities which would, 
otherwise, for ever slumber unknown. The 
very best Nose in profile may be utterly worth- 
less from defect of breadth; for, as before 
observed, no talent is of any use without Cogi- 
tative power ; and every Nose, having breadth 
as well as length (profile), must be submitted to 
the test of this Class before a judgment is 
pronounced upon it. Being, however, anxious 
to simplify the subject, we have not, in our 
notices of Classes I. and II., remarked spe- 
cially on the Cogitative part of their formation, 
and have reserved until this chapter the in- 
stances of those Classes partaking largely of 
Class III. 



92 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 



In the present brief sketch of the science, 
however, we shall not attempt to distinguish 
our instances under the heads of distinct pro- 
files, as, Romano-Cogitative, Greco-Cogitative, 
&c. ; but class together all the compounds par- 
taking sufficiently of the Cogitative form to 
entitle them to a place among Cogitative 
Noses. 

The following persons have Noses which 
largely partake of this important formation : — 



THEOLOGIANS. 


SCIENTIFIC MEN. 


LAWYERS. 


Wicliff. 


Hunter. 


Erskine. 


Luther. 


Jenner. 


Blackstone. 


Cranmer. 


Galileo. 


Mansfield. 


Knox. 


DoUond. 


Hale. 


Tyndale. 


C ax ton. 


Coke. 


Fuller. 


Bacon. 


Somers. 


Hall, Bishop 


W his ton. 




Tillotson. 


Delambre. 


ARTISTS. 


Baxter. 


Wollaston. 


Angelo, Michael 


Bunyan. 


Smeaton. 


Hogarth. 


Hooker. 


Newton. 




Taylor, Jeremy 


Halley. 




South. 


Banks, Sir Joseph 




Warburton. 


Watt. 





OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 



93 



THEOLOGIANS. 

Stillingfleet. 
Chalmers. 
Priestley. 
Wesley. 



POETS. 

Homer. 

Chaucer. 

Tasso. 

Jonson, Ben 

Shakspere. 

Milton (in age). 

Moliere. 

Goethe. 

Wordsworth. 

Mrs. Hemans. 

Burns. 



SCIENTIFIC MEN, 

Cartwright. 
Cuvier. 



STATESMEN 

AND 

METAPHYSICIANS. 

Cromwell, O. 

Grotius. 

Burke. 

Franklin. 

Johnson, Dr. S. 

Mackintosh, Sir J. 

Walpole. 

Pitt. 

Fox. 

Coleridge. 

Washington. 

Hobbes. 



HISTORIANS. 

Selden. 

Camden. 

Usher, Archbishop 

Clarendon. 

Burnet, Bishop 

Buchanan. 

Hume. 

Robertson. 




94 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

In the above instances every one is com- 
pounded with Class I, or II, or both ; and 
would be written i., or i, or -?+5L, or JS^L 
according to the class or sub-class of profile to 
which it might belong. 




The list given is more extensive than usual ; 
yet it might be much extended, and should 
comprise all the greatest names in Theology. 
Science, and Art. 

It has been said, that " the form of the 
Nose in profile, decides the turn which the 
Cogitative power will take." Thus the 
Romano-Cogitative will prefer to exercise its 
cogitativeness in the bustle of active life, and 
Washington and Cromwell present remark- 
able proofs of the truth of this assertion. 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 95 

Another striking instance is the energetic and 
fervent John Knox, who bearded monarchs on 
their thrones, and lawless nobles in their strong- 
holds. 

The major part of our illustrations being 
taken from purely literary men, present Greco- 
Cogitative Noses. It is not our intention to 
descant at length on persons whose works are 
well known, by name at least, to every one, 
and whose lives were, for the most part, passed 
in the usual monotonous tenour of those of 
literary men ; but Bacon may be referred to as 
an important corroborative instance of the 
shrewd, wily measures by which the astute 
Greek prefers to further his ambition. Bacon 
as a man presents such a lamentable contrast 
to Bacon as a philosopher, and the wretched 
underhand means by which he attained emi- 
nence are so well known, and so painful to 
dwell upon, that we refrain from doing more 
than referring the reader to the facts for com- 
parison with his profile. Wretchedly incon- 
sistent as his character appears, it is not incon- 
sistent with his Nose ; and, perhaps, what are 
termed his inconsistencies, are only a proof that 



96 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

the intellectual and moral powers are distinct, 
and that the most profuse development of the 
former, cannot compensate for a deficiency of 
the latter. 

It is unnecessary to dissertate upon the 
names in the present list in order to demon- 
strate their right to appear among the Cogi- 
tatives. No one will deny their title to that 
most enviable epithet, and it would be by por- 
traits alone that the identity between their 
minds and noses could be exhibited to any 
who are incredulous on that subject. To such 
we can only say, examine for yourselves; the 
portraits are, for the most part, easily attainable ; 
and an attentive examination of them will well 
repay the labour, and, without doubt, satisfy 
the most sceptical of the truth of the hypo- 
thesis. 

The names on that list are, for the most 
part, names which are a volume in themselves : 
they write their own history; certainly no 
encomiums of ours can add anything to their 
glory. It is undeniable that it was by close 
cogitation, serious, hard thinking, that each of 
them obtained a place in the rolls of Fame ; 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 97 

and it is equally certain that almost every 
person may, by the same process obtain, if not an 
equal, yet certainly no mean place in the same 
estimable record. 

It is a common and veracious observation, 
that certain faces prevail in certain ages ; but 
it may be further added, that this epochal 
character frequently arises from the formation 
of the Nose, more especially of the Cogitative 
part. 

Up to about the close of the reign of James I. 
the Greco-Cogitative prevailed ; during the time 
of Charles I. and the Protectorate, the Romano- 
Cogitative was almost universal, and the Cogita- 
tive part was much increased in intensity. The 
Noses of the time are remarkably broad and 
thick, a circumstance which can only be attributed 
to the serious religious and political questions 
which then agitated the minds of all men. 
With the careless dissipated days of the second 
Charles came in the thin, long Greek, or Greco- 
Roman Nose, with little or none of the Cogita- 
tive element ; and this for the most part pre- 
vailed up to the commencement of the present 
century. What future ages may determine to 



Sf8 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

be the form of Nose characteristic of our age it 
is impossible to say. We can form no accurate 
judgment, for time alone can separate the tares 
from the wheat, and decide who are the great 
men of our age. 

To an observant mind there is something 
very remarkable in the striking contrast between 
the physiognomies of the leaders in our own 
Rebellion (as it is historically termed) and of 
those of the French revolutionists. Besides a 
certain serious determination, a stern, unflinch- 
ing, dogged consciousness of right, that nothing 
could turn to the right hand or to the left, which 
is visible in the countenances of the former, 
and to be contrasted with the flippant, wicked, 
blood-thirsty-looking smirk of the latter, there 
is a remarkable cqntrast in their Noses. The 
thick, broad, Cogitative Nose is visible in all of 
the former, from Old Noll himself to honest 
Andrew Marvel ; while the void of thought, 
sharp, captious, vulpine Nose is to be seen in 
every one of the bloody tyrants of the French 
sans-culotterie. 

The latter look like men who 

" Could smile, and murder while they smile." 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 99 

The former like men who 
" Put their trust in God and keep their powder dry." 

Wordsworth has so splendidly and truly con- 
trasted the men of either age that we cannot 
resist inserting his lines entire : 

" Great men have been among us ; hands that penn'd 

And tongues that utter'd wisdom — better none ; 

The later Sydney, Marvel, Harrington, 

Young Vane, and others who call'd Milton friend. 

These moralists could act and comprehend ; 

They knew how genuine glory was put on ; 

Taught us how rightfully a nation shone 

In splendour ; what strength was, that would not bend 

But in magnanimous meekness. France, 'tis strange, 

Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then. 

Perpetual emptiness ! unceasing change ! 

No single volume paramount, no code, 

No master-spirit, no determined road ;— 

But equally a want of Books and Men ! 

In the fifth line, " These moralists could act 
and comprehend" we have a beautiful and 
exact paraphrase of the Romano-Cogitative, which 
we noticed as characteristic of the Cromwellian 
age — the union of physical energy with mental 
power 

F 2 



100 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

It was a remark which we heard made some 
thirty years ago by a very observant man, that 
there was a wonderful identity of expression in 
the countenances of all the men of the French 
Revolution, and that the same peculiar ex- 
pression is to be seen in the faces of the con- 
spirators of the Gunpowder Plot. Subsequent 
personal observation has confirmed this remark, 
of which it is a curious and recent corroboration, 
that the same expression is visible in the coun- 
tenances of some of the leading Terrorists of the 
French Revolution. * The countenance of 
" bloody Mary" is an instance of the same 
peculiar expression. 

The old gentleman who made the remark 
which drew our infantine attention added, (and 
it was this perhaps which impressed it upon our 
memory) that there was " blood " written in all 
their faces. 

We cannot improve upon this definition, 



* The physiognomy of M. Ledru-Rollin, the Com- 
munist leader, is said, by an eye-witness, to be " without 
one redeeming quality — insolent, conceited, reckless, 
headstrong, cruel. " / J J 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 101 

though in one word, it might also be 
called a wolfish look — lean, cruel, hungry, 
grinning. 

When treating of the Greek Nose, we stated 
that the Nose of Milton expanded into the 
Cogitative form when, in the latter part of his 
life, he was compelled to turn his thoughts 
anxiously and seriously to the condition of his 
unhappy country, and when, with a holy and 
unswerving determination he devoted his whole 
soul to the composition of a poem, whose fame 
should be co-extensive with the world whose 
creation it described. We then claimed this 
instance of change of form coincident with 
change of character, as a proof of the correct- 
ness of the hypothesis. It was however a super- 
fluous precaution, for the coincident change is 
equally true in almost every instance of the 
Cogitative Nose. No man can alter the profile 
of his Nose, but he may increase its latitudinal 
diameter. As to the former, he must submit to 
have it what shape God pleases ; as to the latter, 
he may make it almost any shape he himself 
pleases — for the one indicates acquired habits, 
the other inherent properties. / 






102 OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 

The Cogitative Nose expands with expanding 
thoughts and is therefore rarely, if ever, much 
developed in youth ; neither, on the other hand, 
is the very sharp or Non-cogitative Nose fre- 
quently visible in early life, for there are few to 
whom God has not given the elements of 
thought. It is our own faults, therefore, if we 
throw away the talents bestowed upon us, and 
suffer our minds to degenerate into inanity and 
our Noses into sharpness. 

For this reason, it is a laudable ambition in a 
young man to cultivate a Cogitative Nose, for 
he can only do so by cultivating his mind. 
And, forasmuch as it is the only part of the 
Nose which is under the control of the owner, 
so it is that w T hich can be most distinctly judged 
of and its expansion watched ; for, though the 
owner can never see the perfect profile of his 
Nose, he may always form a correct estimate of 
ytiTbreadth. We should be quite justified in 
adding this to the numerous proofs of design in 
the adaptation of the human body to the soul, 
but as many persons cannot surmount a certain 
sense of the ridiculous in the subject before us. 
we forbear. Those who are impressed with the 



OF THE COGITATIVE NOSE. 103 

truth of our system will at once admit the in- 
ference, and perceive its value in Natural 
Theology.^ 

As it has been deemed unnecessary to extend 
the present chapter with any biographical or 
critical sketches of the examples adduced in cor- 
roboration of Class III., we will devote the next 
to the more useful task of inquiring how a 
Cogitative Mind and its certain accompaniment, 
a Cogitative Nose, may be acquired. 



* We trust no one will misunderstand these obser- 
vations, but give us credit for making them sincerely! 
and with all reverence ; firmly convinced as we are, that I 
if the system is true, it must, like all other sciences 
furnish its quota of proofs of design in the universe. 



CHAPTER V. 

HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

It is a great and prevalent mistake to imagine 
that a Cogitative mind (and Nose) is to be 
acquired by reading alone. It is almost certain 
that, as books multiply, Cogitative Minds de- 
crease, for how is a man to think, if all his 
thinking is done for him ? The mind, when 
constantly supplied with extraneous thoughts 
must, without great care, lose the habit of 
generating internal ones. All the greatest 
thinkers have been the first in their depart- 
ment of thought. Homer, Dante, Chaucer, 
Shakspere, Bacon, &c. These men, as com- 
pared with even mediocre men in our day, 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 105 

had very little learning, — but they had vast 
wisdom. 

Read Bacon's Novum Organum and Sylva 
for instance, and see how few facts there are in 
them but such as are either now known to, or 
laughed at, by every school-boy ; yet direct your 
attention to the train of thought, to the gene- 
ralizations from these simple facts, to the 
originality of the deductions, and behold how 
the dwarf in Knowledge becomes a giant in 
Wisdom ! It is even true that Bacon was 
behind his cotemporaries in many matters of 
mere knowledge ; yet the majesty of his wis- 
dom was so vast that it still rules, and ever 
must rule, the world of science. 

So, as on the one hand, a man may have 
wisdom and yet want knowledge ; on the other, 
he may have all knowledge and be able to dis- 
course of all things, from the hyssop to the 
cedar, and yet want wisdom. It is of no use to 
read and accumulate facts if we do not also 
think. Better indeed to think and never read, 
than read and not think. If a man does not 
think for himself, if he does not originate ideas, 
if books are not to him only the elements of 

f 3 



106 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

thought, if he is not fully and immoveably im- 
pressed with the conviction that two and two 
make five, or any greater number which the 
Cogitative Mind can evolve, he has no chance of 
becoming a wise man, whatever his learning, and 
however profound his acquaintance with the 
thoughts of other men. 

But you reply, two and two do not, and 
cannot, make five, &c. We rejoin, they as 
certainly and unquestionably do in metaphysics, 
as they certainly and unquestionably do not in 
physics. True, in physics, two and two things, 
two and two facts make four, and only four ; but 
if the mind, when in possession of those four, 
can generate nothing more from them it is a 
hopeless case with that mind. If, upon the 
recipience of such four facts the mind remains 
contented with the mathematical fact that, 
from four units it has segregated four, it is, 
and for ever will, remain stationary ; it has 
gained nothing, and might as well have left 
those four facts in their original units, for 
their addition has not added to it one particle 
of wisdom. 

Facts are, or ought to be, only the generators 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 107 

of ideas. Facts in themselves are utterly worth- 
less; it is in their associations, in their con- 
sequences, their bearings on each other ; it is as 
they support or refute systems, theories and 
other mind-born facts, that they are of value. 
Now, it is only by the action of mind upon 
them that they have associations, consequences, 
&c. Without mind, facts must for ever remain 
units ; even though added together, ad infinitum, 
they have no natural co-unity, no cohesion, no 
affinity for each other. A thousand facts added 
together are still but a thousand units, unless 
mind has cohered them into a system. This 
done, you clearly have the thousand facts still, 
but you have also something infinitely more 
valuable, you have a mind-born fact, a deduc- 
tion, a system, hypothesis, theory, axiom, or 
whatever you please to call it. 

Cordially as we hate coining new words, we 
still more cordially hate the German fashion of 
hooking two words together by a hyphen and 
calling the junction an addition to the language. 
But we are compelled, in order to save circum- 
locution, to coin a word to express those facts 
which spring from Mind, whether, as in moral 



108 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. .- 

philosophy, purely metaphysical, or as in natural 
philosophy, generated by Mind from Matter, by 
Reason from Experience. Such facts we would 
beg to call noogenisms (voog, mens, cogitatio, 
and ysvog, natus. progenies) ; therein including 
all mental offsprings or deductions, whether 
called hypotheses, theories, systems, sciences, 
axioms, aphorisms, &c. 

Noogenisms, therefore, are those facts which 
mind generates from other facts without anni- 
hilating the latter; hence it is said that, 
metaphysically, two and two make five. Thus, 
mind, contemplating the physical facts of the 
super-position of strata, deduces from and adds 
to them this metaphysical fact or noogenism : 
— Strata were deposited successively. 

Herein appears too an essential difference 
between Mind and Matter. If diverse sub- 
stances, having a natural affinity, be amalga- 
mated, a new substance is obtained, but 
the elements are lost. Of hydrogen and 
oxygen water may be made, but the gases are 
forthwith lost in the fluid ; the procedure may 
be reversed and the water be converted into 
gases, but the water has disappeared. This is 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 109 

not so with mind and noogenisms ; for however 
closely, by a mental synthesis, diverse facts may 
be united into a new fact or noogenism, the 
latter is obtained without losing the former or 
elementary facts, which remain as knowledge, 
elements of wisdom to support the noogenism or 
create others. 

We see then, that while Mind is crescive 
Matter is not. Matter is neither crescive nor 
decrescive. It may be changed into divers 
forms, animal, vegetable, or mineral, but it 
never can be varied in quantity. The six feet 
of animated clay dies, it rots in the silent tomb ; 
years pass by. The hand of affection which 
protected the loathsome, yet — for the once 
animating spirit's sake — beloved, remains is cold 
and rotted too. The sepulchre so long for- 
gotten and deserted again becomes of interest to 
the brother of the hyaena, and the resurrectionist 
— the antiquarian. He, in his cool business-like 
phraseology, opens a barrow or exhumes a tomb, 
and finds — what ? A pound of dust ! The 
sole visible remains of a gigantic hero or a 
stalwart king. Yet, is not one particle of that 
ancient demigod perished. Every atom is, in 



1 1 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

some shape or other, in the universe. Some 
atoms may " have gone a passage through the 
guts of a beggar," and so have nurtured another 
human form ; some may have stopped a beer- 
barrel and so 

" Imperious Caesar dead, and turn'd to clay, 
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away." 

The theory of the metempsychosis is true of 
Matter ; and as the ancient sages believed the soul 
to be material, that theory, so far from being 
violently absurd (as we in the pride of better know- 
ledge are apt to term it), was almost the only 
theory which the thinking and observant mind 
could of itself elaborate. Hence the adoption of 
that system by far-distant nations is no proof of 
inter-communication. What the Brahmin in 
India found a natural result of the doctrine of 
the materiality of the soul and its conse- 
quent analogy to everything else material, the 
Druid in Britain would arrive at with equal 
ease. 

But Mind is both crescive and decrescive ; and 
it is another peculiar property of Mind, that it 
is never stationary, — it is always changing, in- 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. Ill 

creasing or decreasing. This is an important 
consideration ; a fearful responsibility cast upon 
it. If the one talent (and God has so benignly 
ordered it, that no sane, and therefore respon- 
sible, mind is devoid of, at least, one talent,) is 
hid in a napkin, the servant is condemned and 
his talent taken from him. But if the talent is 
put out to use, it will increase and grow, and 
make other talents, and the lord of that servant 
will receive his own again with usury. For, 
having endowed man with this crescive power, 
He justly demands that power to be exercised 
and the mind to be enlarged and expanded " by 
every one according to his several ability," so 
that He may reap the harvest which His well- 
rewarded servants have gathered in, " reaping 
where He hath not sown, and gathering where 
He hath not strewed/' 

The very cause of this crescive power of mind 
is, that the sum of the units aggregated by 
mind is greater than the mathematical sum of 
the units ; and the cause of this is, that facts, 
the elements of noogenisms, are not, like 
chemical elements, lost in the fact compounded 
from them, but retain likewise a separate in- 



1 1 2 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. ^ 

dependent existence, capable of being again 
compounded into other noogenisms, and still 
ever without losing their original forms. 

It will now be understood what is meant by 
two and two making five, &c. ; and until a man 
is incontrovertible 7 convinced of the possibility of 
this he will in vain multiply facts. Facts must 
be added together, not for their arithmetical 
product, which is Knowledge, but for their 
metaphysical product, which is Wisdom. You 
will frequently hear asked by utilitarians, what 
is the use (cut bono ?) of such and such 
knowledge ? Remember that the use of all 
Knowledge is to feed the mind and to 
generate Wisdom, and you will always have 
this ready and sufficient reply, " It is food for 
thought," 

And here it may not be out of place to 
endeavour to point out by an example the 
difference between knowledge and wisdom, and 
at the same time elucidate more clearly how the 
former is to be made subservient to and the 
genetrix of the latter. We observe that a 
certain quartz-stone is round. We have 
learnt two facts, the nature and form of 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 113 

the stone. Now what is the value of those 
facts per se ? The recipience of them has 
increased our knowledge, but is the mind 
strengthened or rendered one jot wiser ? We 
trow not* But as a key or foundation to 
an aqueous theory of geology they are almost 
infinitely important. The Cogitative Mind per- 
ceives that the round stone must have once 
been an angular fragment broken off from some 
rock of quartz, and asks, " How came it broken 
off? and how came it round?" The answers 
are a whole system of geology ; nay, perhaps an 
entire system of the universe, a noogenism of 
the sublimest kind. # Have not these facts 
generated ? Is it not clear that, if the physical 

* The use of this word would often save the quibble, 
whether a system is entitled to be called a science or 
only a theory or hypothesis. Thus both the advocates 
and the opponents of phrenology or geology might agree 
to call them noogenisms. For this reason we apply the 
word here to geology, which some persons assert to be 
more than a mere hypothesis, while others deny its 
claim to be called a science. At present we claim for 
Nasology no higher title than that of a mental deduc- 
tion from facts or noogenism. 



114 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSEr 

units had remained metaphysical units they 
would have been valueless? but being sub- 
mitted to the powerful energy of intense thought 
they become the parents of a noogenism, into 
which " the angels desired to look," and at the 
first dawn of which, from the primaeval chaos, 
" the morning stars sang together, and all the 
sons of God shouted for joy." 

Neither is this instance fanciful; for, while 
we write, it reminds us that this identical simple 
fact, — a round pebble on a common, — appeared 
to Paley to be one from which the mind could 
evolve nothing, and therefore he contrasted it 
with a watch, whose mechanism led the mind 
to theorize on its causes and origin ; whereas, a 
recent commentator thereon justly observes, that 
the stone was as fertile a source of cogitation 
and as able a guide " from Nature up to 
Nature's God," as the watch w T as from itself to 
its maker. 

From this example let us take warning, that 
facts be not to us nothing more than round 
stones. Let us be careful never to let our 
minds rest content with the mere accumulation 
of facts, but ever strive to build them up into 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 115 

something more useful and ennobling. Let us 
use them as bricks — mere logs of burnt clay in 
themselves, but fit to build glorious monuments 
of the sublime power of human invention. Let 
us remember that Ideas are the only things of 
real permanent value in this world; and that 
though we may store our brains with Facts till 
our heads burst, unless those facts are to us 
only generators of Ideas, we have not, and 
cannot acquire a Cogitative mind ; we may have 
Knowledge, but we have not Wisdom. A wise 
man hath wisely said, that " the wise man is " 
— not he who knoweth things, but — " he who 
knoweth the interpretation of a thing 5 ' [Eccles. 
viii. 21] ; and for this purpose only it is that, 
" Wise men lay up knowledge" [Prov. x. 14], 
for " Wisdom finds out knowledge of witty in- 
ventions. 55 [Prov. viii. 12]. 

In order to effectually discipline the mind 
to attentive study and to save it from the 
strong temptation which is offered to desultory 
reading, it is advisable for the adult and par- 
tially educated student to form an hypothesis and 
read up to it. To reverse, in fact, the Baconian 
principles of philosophy, and to study from 



116 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE- 

hypothesis to facts, and not from facts to 
hypothesis. This is, it is true, opposed to 
modern philosophical principles, but properly 
modified and carefully guarded against self- 
conceit and dogmatism it is almost the only 
proper and effective mode of study. It is the 
ancient or Aristotelian mode ; and though, 
when refuted by Bacon, as a mode of " discover- 
ing the sciences " it had become shamefully 
abused and degenerate, it has produced more 
great original thinkers than the modern. 
Observe, that we recommend it only as a mode 
of study, i. e., of disciplining and exercising the 
mind, for beyond the purpose of training it 
should not be pursued. It is too dangerous to 
be prosecuted far, for the mind which has long 
formed and nursed up a favourite hypothesis is 
unwilling to abandon it, and is too apt to 
force all facts into accordance with it, instead 
of modifying or abandoning it as new facts 
arise. 

But the great advantages of this plan, as a 
training process, would appear to be — 1st. That 
the mind being thus occupied with an hypothesis 
has always that to direct its researches in a 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 117 

settled, uniform, and definite course. 2nd. That 
every new fact accumulated is immediately com- 
pared with the hypothesis, and is incorporated 
or written off as contra, after this mental 
exercise, as occasion may require. Thus no 
fact ever comes into the mind without being 
subjected to thought and giving exercise to the 
important faculty of comparison. And this pro- 
cess of comparing, to which every fact must be 
subjected, will not only impress the fact and 
its comparatives on the memory, but will 
powerfully tend to exercise and strengthen the 
Cogitative powers; for there is no operation 
of mind which more actively calls into energy 
all the faculties at once than comparing, be- 
cause to compare two things fairly we must 
(so to speak) know the length, breadth, 
depth, density and powers of each. 3rd. 
A steady habit of reading is acquired ; we 
read with a definite aim — the establishment 
or refutation (we ought not to care which) of 
our hypothesis, and, however wide and discursive 
our reading, there is little danger of its becoming 
desultory — that curse and bane of modern mind. 
The Baconian process of accumulating facts 



118 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOS£. 

before hypothesising, almost demands desultory 
reading, for the mind sees no fixed end towards 
which it shall arrive ; it is not permitted to 
guess what may be the result of its studies, and 
hence too often loses all interest in them, and 
remains content with the barren accumulation of 
things. 

What we would suggest may be thus illus- 
trated : Let a man, intending to study history, 
first adopt an hypothesis — of course he must 
have some pre-knowledge. It matters not what 
the hypothesis, so that it is likely to involve a 
very wide field of inquiry. If he contemplate 
primaeval history, let him adopt some such pro- 
position as this, " Whether we can infer from 
the institutions of mankind that they all 
spring from one common ancestor ?" Or this, 
"Whether any nation whose national records 
have been preserved were the first owners of the 
soil ?" 

Is it not obvious, that with some such 
proposition before the mind it will take much 
more interest in and more steadily direct its 
studies, and that facts will be more easily re- 
membered, from their bearing on the hypothesis, 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 119 

than if merely received as naked, isolated 
units ? 

The only precautions to be taken are, not to 
be too strongly wedded to either side of our 
hypothesis, nor to sit down too soon satisfied 
that it is proved or disproved, nor to set up for 
teachers and discoverers, while we are only 
learners and making discoveries. 

It will be seen hereafter that, notwithstanding 
what has been said, we differ not at all from 
Bacon himself; we differ only from his pseudo- 
disciples, who have no more in common 
with his enlarged views of the uses of science 
than the schools had with Aristotle, or the New 
Academy with Plato. Nevertheless, we well 
know that we shall be well abused by these 
disciples as an impugner of Bacon, and as a 
heretic to his philosophy, just as your pious 
people condemn as an infidel or atheist every 
one who denies any dogma which their wild 
enthusiasm has grafted on the Bible. It is 
not in religion alone that bigotry is to be 
found. 

Bacon himself pursued the mode of study 
which we suggest. At fifteen he formed an 



120 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

hypothesis, and devoted his whole life to its 
elucidation. The hypothesis round which, as a 
centre, he gathered every fact within his reach 
was this : Whether or not the Aristotelian was 
the best mode of cultivating the mind, and of 
discovering the sciences ? 

He seems at first to have been disposed to 
think that it was neither ; but the conclusion to 
which he finally came, after many years of close 
thought and arduous study, was, that it was the 
best mode of cultivating the mind, but the worst 
mode of discovering the sciences. He did not 
soon sit down satisfied that he was right, and 
set up for a dogmatic teacher of his new phi- 
losophy. He waited patiently for any new light 
which years and experience might throw upon it, 
either bringing out more brightly its beauties or 
disclosing more satisfactorily its errors. Once 
in each year he reviewed it and tested it by the 
new facts which he had gleaned during the 
year's studies. Once in each year, for twelve 
long years, he wrote out with his own hand, 
altering, condensing and verifying his Novum 
Organum before he published it. 

So much stress has, notwithstanding this 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 121 

illustrious example of the master, been laid, ever 
since the publication of the Baconian or induc- 
tive philosophy, upon the bare accumulation of 
facts, and so much has been written against 
generalizing and hypothesizing, that it may be as 
well, before quitting the subject, to point out 
wherein the disciples of Bacon have neglected 
the precepts of their master ; and to inquire 
whether this neglect, and the only partial 
adoption of his teachings, have not contributed 
greatly to the advancement of mere Knowledge 
at the expense of true Wisdom, and thus been a 
very important cause of the degeneracy of 
modern mind. 

Bacon seems to have foreseen this effect of 
the exclusive adoption of the experimental part 
of his philosophy — the only part which men 
have yet had the courage to adopt — when he 
said, " Our way of discovering the sciences 
almost levels the capacities of men, and leaves 
little room for excellence, as it performs all 
things by sure rules and demonstrations, and 
therefore these discoveries of ours are, as we 
have often said, rather owing to felicity than to 
any great talent, and are rather the production 

G 



122 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. ^ 

of time than of genius." # It was for this reason 
that he so earnestly, as we shall see hereafter, 
insisted against its use by young and common 
minds, or as a means of mental cultivation. 
And too truly has the prophetic caution been 
fulfilled ! Nevertheless, as it will be loudly 
denied that modern mind is degenerate, it may 
be as well to ask how much we are in anything, 
except physical science ' (facts, or what Bacon 
calls, "Experience"), in advance of our two- 
hundred-years' dead ancestors. Array the names 
in our list of Cogitatives, chronologically and 
analytically, or do so by any list of great thinkers, 
and you will scarcely find a proportion of one 
since 1700, to three who lived between 1550 
and that date. 

Nevertheless, though there is this falling off 
in Wisdom, how vast has been the accession of 
Knowledge. Bacon, in his day, complained that 
the former (Reason) had gone on without the 
latter (Experience) ; so that, while mind had 
attained the highest flights of which it seemed 
capable, the arcana of nature were yet unexplored, 

* Nov. Ore:., Sec. VII. 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 123 

and little or nothing had been done to advance 
man's physical welfare. He said that, hitherto, 
reason and experience were as new gifts of the 
gods : — the one laid on the back of a light bird, 
the other on a dull ass, and that as yet they had 
not been united. His object was to unite them ; 
to this purpose, he devoted his gifted mind and 
strained his utmost energies. Yet if he were 
living now he would be compelled to make the 
same complaint, with this variation however, 
that men have abandoned the burden of the 
bird, and have loaded themselves with that of 
the ass. 

While then we admit the rapid advancement 
of knowledge, let us pause a moment and 
inquire if it is not a proof of the degeneracy of 
mind and the decay of wisdom, that, in that 
which is purely mental or dependent on mind, 
we have no names of equal note with the names 
of those who lived before the exclusive adoption 
of the experimental part of the Baconian phi- 
losophy. Where is the name in poetry to set 
against Shakspere and Milton ; in metaphysics 
to match with Locke, Hobbes, &c. ; in deduction 
from facts and generalization with Bacon, New- 

G 2 



124 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. < 

ton, Halley, &c; in theology, with the hundreds 
of names which yet eclipse all modern commen- 
tators ? It may perhaps be said in reply, if we 
have not such great minds, we have a larger 
number of thinkers of lesser magnitude. This 
is doubtful. Time has obliterated the swarms 
of lesser fry who, like their congeners of the 
nineteenth century, lived their day and gained a 
temporary fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries. But further, it is easy to be a triton 
among minnows. It is as easy now-a-days to 
set up for a literary character and " write a 
book " without an idea, as it is for an insolvent 
man to pass for a rich one and live sumptuously 
on borrowed capital and paper money. Our 
thousands of authors are but the minnows which 
sport in the shallow brooks and live their little 
day in glorious self-gratulation on the laudations 
of their brother minnows ; but if they happen to 
get out into the deep, strong waters and a triton 
turns his stern eye upon them — pop — they turn 
their tails round, dive to the bottom and are 
seen no more. Thus it was with our novel- 
ists ; they shone and blazed away — happy, 
glorious book-wrights — till the triton Scott 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 125 

came athwart their path, and straightway they 
were gone. And surely, surely, we now again 
want another Scott to demolish the rapidly in- 
creasing tribe of cachinnators, who appear to 
deem that the proper end of light literature is 
just to raise a temporary laugh and be forgotten. 
Heaven send us salvation from more Jerrolds, 
a Beckets and the whole tribe of ephemeral 
laughing-stocks ! It is the same in other and 
more important departments of literature. Our 
historians are mere compilers of old letters ; we 
fly to Germany for historical criticism and acute 
generalizations from facts, contenting ourselves 
with laboriously picking up a few obscure facts 
for the use of our more deeply-thinking neigh- 
bours ; who are treading in the paths which our 
own sages trod two hundred and fifty years ago, 
because they have not yet placed the exact 
sciences at the head of intellectual pursuits, and 
abandoned thought for mechanisms, generaliza- 
tions from facts for the barren accumulation of 
facts. 

The complaint of Lord Bacon is truer now 
than it was in his time : " If a man turn his 
eyes to libraries, he may perhaps be surprised at 



126 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

the immense variety of books he finds ; but upon 
examining and diligently weighing their matters 
and contents, he will be struck with amazement 
on the other side ; and after finding no end of 
repetitions, but that men continually treat and 
speak the same things over and over again, fall 
from admiration of the variety into a wonder at 
the want and scantiness of those things which 
have hitherto detained and possessed the minds 
of men." Unhappily his system, by the 
universal and indiscriminate adoption of only 
its lower and material offices to the exclusion of 
those higher ends which he contemplated from 
it, and by its being used as a mode of cultivating 
the mind, as well as a means of discovering the 
sciences, has rather strengthened than weakened 
the justice of these censures. Our Augustan 
age of thought is still that of Elizabeth and 
James I. ; the latter part of the sixteenth, and 
the early part of the seventeenth centuries still 
outshine the nineteenth in loftiness of thought 
and solidity of learning; yet we complacently 
boast of our progress, because we rattle through 
the fields of learning at ten times the speed of 
our ancestors, as we do over our railway-sected 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 127 

country, gleaning about as little information of 
the one as of the other. We dash through the 
deep cuttings and dark tunnels of literature at 
railway speed, taking assertions for facts, and 
empty declamation and tawdry immorality for 
sense and religion ; and then, like the nervous 
lady who rides through a railway tunnel without 
fainting, congratulate ourselves on having accom- 
plished some gigantic feat; though we have 
learnt just as much about the subject of our 
studies as she has of the construction of the 
tunnel ; but having, like her, fretted and fumed 
for a few minutes at some dark difficulty, we 
unite with her in thinking ourselves very valiant 
and clever people. 

We avail ourselves of the roads and paths 
which others have made, and never stop to 
examine their solidity or foundations, or the 
principles on which they are constructed. We 
lose the habit of deep investigation and close 
thinking by a long and entire reliance on others, 
and our minds become dissipated, and a prey to 
all the silly novelties which spring like ephemera 
from the almost stagnant pools of modern 
brains. 



128 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. -> 

This mental dissipation and its concomitant 
evil, reading for the purpose of killing time, — - 
with far more baneful effects than never reading 
at all, but relying merely on our own serious 
excogitations, — are curses from which we ought 
earnestly to endeavour to save ourselves. This 
we can only do by sternly exercising the mind in 
settled definite habits of thought, by placing before 
it a determinate aim and end to its cogitations. 
It must know beforehand whither it is tending, 
so that, as it proceeds, it may note its progress, 
and be able to judge whether it is advancing or 
receding. It w r ould be as absurd for a man to 
start on a journey without knowing whither he 
was going, but to be continually trying first one 
road and then another, in hopes it would bring 
him somewhere, as it is for a student to sit down 
to study without any definite purpose or view- 
before him. True, the traveller might pick up 
many facts and get some knowledge in his 
desultory course, and so might the student ; but 
neither would be advanced on his journey or 
have gained any true wisdom. Yet this is the 
course of modern study. Loose desultory read- 
ing : a vague acquisition of unconnected facts is 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 129 

alone aimed at. Witness the transactions of 
our scientific bodies — a huge undigested mass of 
valuable facts ; the raw materials, the bricks of 
knowledge, which no one has dared yet to 
generalize or build up into a harmonious and 
well-proportioned temple of wisdom. 

Modern savans shrink from using the 
materials which, for several centuries, thousands 
of laborious literary ants have been collecting. 
Like the unhappy Psyche, doomed by the in- 
exorable Venus to arrange and sort into re- 
spective heaps a confused mass of wheat, barley, 
rye, millet and other kinds of grain, they sit 
down in despair of accomplishing the apparently 
hopeless task. Frightened at the gigantic labour, 
they not only fly from it themselves but condemn 
every one who attempts to arrange systematically 
the grains which, assorted, would afford valuable 
seed for fresh crops of food, but which, while 
thus intermingled, are utterly useless and un- 
productive. With an insane determination not 
to see the work which it is the duty imposed 
on the soul (Psyche) by the prolific powers of 
nature (Venus) to accomplish, they go on adding 

g 3 



130 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

to the heterogeneous heap, and endeavour, by 
loud and clamorous applauses of those who 
are mere collectors like themselves, to drown 
the voice of those who would incite them to 
the enjoined and higher duty of assorting and 
arranging. 

Should any one, like the able but mistaken 
author of the " Vestiges of the Natural History of 
Creation," endeavour to bring Thought to bear 
upon these dry bones and make them live, to 
generalize and build up a system from them, 
great is the outcry and terrible are the denuncia- 
tions. The modern Prometheus, who would 
animate with the celestial fire of forethought the 
clav which lies a dead and useless mass at 
his feet, is clamorously damned by his timid 
brethren the Epimethei, the after or past- 
thinkers ; and, unless he is endowed with 
more than mortal power, he must submit to 
have his heart daily devoured by the racking 
fiends — envy, hatred, malice and all uncharit- 
ableness. 

One of the laborious ants of whom we have 
been speaking asks, " For what do we read?" 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 131 

and complacently answers, "To know facts"* 
Indeed ! The highest office of mind is to make 
itself a barren store-house ! To us it appears, 
on the contrary, that we should read and study 
generally, not to know facts, but to be wise from 
facts, to make the head wiser and the heart 
better. The mind is not to be considered as a 
mere granary and barren receptacle of literary 
food, but rather as the stomach which converts 
into a new substance — assimilating good healthy 
flesh and blood — the heterogeneous materials 
which are put into it. Another ant, of no mean 
pretensions among his brethren, enthusiastically 
endeavours, by promises of " literary glory," to 
incite some of them to pile up into one heap the 
confused materials they have collected. "Let 
us see," he says with childish glee, " how much 
we've got ! You John, and you Willy, and you 
Bobby bring what you've collected ! There pile 
it up ! Make a snow man ; cut him eyes, and 



* How different is the language of the disciple from 
that of the master ! Bacon himself says, " Read not to 
contradict nor to believe (£. e. for facts), but to weigh and 
consider" 



132 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

nose, and mouth." There he is with a pipe in 
his white lips. Doesn't he look sage, and grave 
and solemn ? Dance round him, ye children ; 
clap your hands and be merry. Rejoice over 
your work while it lasts. The first warm breath 
of spring will melt it away. It is no man, it 
has no life, it is cold and dead. The snow, 
give it what shape you will, is snow still. You 
have collected much, but you have got nothing 
new out of your collection. But lest it should 
be supposed that we belie this celebrated ant — 
this collector of grain — we will quote his own 
words : " Within the last two hundred years 
(says Professor Playfair), or since Galileo and 
Bacon taught us this great lesson, we have been 
employed in recording facts in ten thousand 
several volumes. But thus scattered, they lose 
so much of their value and importance, that, in 
another age, we may hope some aspirant after 
literary glory will perform the Herculean labour 
of condensing the whole into (What ? — a system 
of the universe ? a better knowledge of nature ? 
No !) a volume /" A volume ! that is to say, 
gather the scattered masses into one heap as 
heterogeneous as the scattered masses; pile up 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 133 

the snow, strewed over pathway and field, 
hedge and ditch, into a snow man. That is the 
highest aspiration of this Professor of divers 
learned societies. His grovelling soul soars not 
to the hope that any new fact may be extracted 
by mind from this vast heap of raw materials. 
He knows not that, metaphysically, two and two 
make five, and that without any other material 
additions, without any more ant-collections, the 
heap may be made to grow and swell, that the 
spirit of life may be breathed into it, and that, 
wedded to mind, it may even become the 
prolific parent of new facts of a far higher 
and more enduring nature than any in his 
boasted volume. Facts, which, having mind 
for one of their parents, will with filial love pay 
back in tenfold blessings the life given them ; 
facts which will lead that parent to unravel the 
mysterious secrets of nature and enable her to 
behold the wonderful arcana of its Holy of 
Holies. 

This is the purpose for which we should read, 
and this the glorious end for which we should 
collect facts ; instead of merely contenting our- 
selves with being employed, as Playfair too truly 



134 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

says we have been since the time of Bacon, " in 
recording facts in ten thousand several volumes," 
with no higher aspiration than that some la- 
borious stable-cleaner may sweep them up, hay 
and straw, corn and rubbish into one vast heap. 
Since this was written, it pleases us to see that 
the able author of " Vestiges of the Natural 
History of Creation" has in his " Explanations 5 ' 
spoken to the same effect and added another 
instance of the low estimate formed by modern 
scientific minds of the uses of facts. " From 
year to year and from age to age we see scientific 
men at work, adding, no doubt, much to the 
known, and advancing many important interests, 
but at the same time doing little for the es- 
tablishment of comprehensive views of nature. 
Experiments, in however narrow a walk, facts, 
of whatever minuteness, make reputations in 
scientific societies. All beyond is regarded with 
suspicion and distrust. The consequence is, 
that philosophy, as it exists among us, does 
nothing to raise its votaries above the common 
ideas of their time. Let me call upon the 
reader to bring to his remembrance the im- 
pressions which have been usually made upon 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 135 

him by the transactions of learned societies, and 
the pursuits of individual men of science. Did 
he not always feel that while there was laudable 
industry and zeal there was also an intellectual 
timidity, rendering all the results philosophically 
barren ? 

" Perhaps a more lively illustration of their 
deficiency in the life and soul of nature-seekiny 
could not be presented than in the view which 
Sir John Herschel gives of the uses of science, 
in a Treatise reputed as one of the most philo- 
sophical ever produced in our country. These 
uses, according to the learned knight, are strictly 
material — it might be said sordid — namely, ' to 
show us how to avoid attempting impossibilities, 
to secure us from important mistakes, in 
attempting what is in itself possible by means 
either inadequate or actually opposed to the end 
in view ; to enable us to accomplish our ends in 
the easiest, shortest and most economical and 
most effectual manner ; to induce us to attempt 
and enable us to accomplish, objects which, but 
for such knowledge, we should never have 
thought of undertaking.' 

" Such results, it will be felt, may occasionally 



136 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

be of importance in saving a country gentleman 
from a hopeless mining speculation, or in adding 
to the powers and profits of an iron-foundry or 
a cotton-mill, but nothing more. When the 
awakened and craving mind asks what science 
can do for us in explaining the great ends of 
the author of nature, and our relations to Him, 
to good and evil, to life and to eternity, the 
man of science turns to his collection of shells 
or butterflies, to his electric machine or his 
retort, and is mute as a child who, sport- 
ing on the beach, is asked what lands lie 
beyond the great ocean which stretches before 
him."* 

This is unhappily too true a picture of 
modern science. Every effort is made in scien- 
tific works to impress the material and sordid 
money-getting uses of science as its only true 
end, and the highest relation which it bears to 
humanity. Read any tract on the uses of 
geology, and is there a word of high hope that 
the addition which recent discoveries in this 
department have made to knowledge will assist 

* Explanations, 2nd Edit. p. 78. 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 137 

in raising and elevating the mind, or throw any 
new light upon the mysteries of nature ? 

Not a word : but it is carefully detailed how 
an acquaintance with the order of stratified 
rocks will facilitate the discovery of minerals, 
or the boring of Artesian wells. 

Are the uses of astronomy dwelt upon, we 
are taught that it enables the seaman to navi- 
gate trackless seas for commerce or for war. 
Are the purposes of chemistry detailed, we learn 
that it is fertile in assisting the manufacturer to 
cheapen his goods, and undersell his less expe- 
rienced neighbour. 

And are we to believe that for these base 
uses it will be given to man to penetrate the 
wonders of the universe, and read the unex- 
plained mystery of its creation ? Surely not. 
No, verily, we must raise our souls far above 
these debasing cares, before the great and bene- 
ficent God will permit us to understand His 
sublime works. We must come to the task 
with clean hands, with pure, holy, unsullied 
minds, with humble, but high aspirations, with 
the submission of little children, but with the 
elevation of pure wisdom. 



138 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE» 

Is it possible that mind can progress at all, 
if it is for ever fixed on the earth, grovelling 
after barren facts and never lifted up to heaven, 
nor exercised in contemplation of the discove- 
ries it has accumulated? Is it possible that 
the mind can ever be wise which believes that it 
must study for facts, and not to ' weigh and 
consider?' Must not the former for ever remain 
the mere basket of the rag-and-bone collector ? 
the receptacle and dead vehicle of material 
things ? Is it not better that the mind should 
be exercised, like ■ a light bird,' in the wildest 
and most visionary dreams, than be reduced 
to such a ' dull ass,' or dead entity ? If the 
student would avoid the latter, he must aban- 
don the mere accumulation of facts for the 
comparing and weighing of evidence, the calm 
looking for results, and the deliberate genera- 
lization from the facts collected by the fact -col- 
lectors ; the rag-and-bone-pickers, the hewers of 
wood and drawers of water of the human race. 
Nevertheless despise them not ; they fill then- 
allotted station in the world ; they are as neces- 
sary to the thinkers as the different ranks in 
society are to each other. Bear in mind that 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 139 

Bacon never intended his system for students, 
or to be used as a mental exercise. He only 
proposed it as a means, (and confessedly the 
only true means) of ' discovering the sciences/ 
and not as a mode of ' cultivating' the mind. 
It was to be the exercise of the experienced and 
completely cultivated mind only, ' of the man of 
riper years, sound in his senses, and of a clear, 
unbiassed mind.' # He foresaw and cautioned 
against its abuse by ' vulgar minds.' And in 
the sense used by him all young and learning 
minds are vulgar (common) minds. The 
specialities which must distinguish them from 
the common herd, are as yet unknown and 
hidden beneath the crust of inexperienced 
ignorance. 

He himself earnestly prays that his own and 
the Aristotelian system may live together, and 
go hand in hand, the latter to cultivate the 
mind, the former to discover facts. His words 
so long forgotten and unheeded by his disciples 
are : " Let there be therefore, by joint consent, 
two fountains, or dispensations of doctrine, and 

* Nov. Organ. 



140 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE.. 

two tribes of Philosophers, by no means ene- 
mies or strangers, but confederates and mutual 
auxiliaries to each other ; and let there be one 
method of cultivating, and another of dis- 
covering the sciences. Nor is our's very 
obvious, and to be taken at once, nor tempt- 
ing to the understanding, nor suited to vulgar 
capacities, but solely rests upon its utility and 
effects" (i. e. upon the way in which it is used 
and the results which proceed from it). " But 
no one, sure, can suspect, that we desire to 
destroy and demolish the philosophy, the arts, 
and the sciences at present in use ; for, on the 
contrary, we embrace their use, and willingly 
pay them all due honour and observance. For 
we openly declare that the things we offer, are 
not very conducive to these purposes (mental 
exercises), as they cannot be brought down to 
vulgar capacities, otherwise than by effects and 
works."* Therefore in advocating the reten- 
tion of the Aristotelian mode of thinking for 
students, we do but follow in the footsteps of 
his great opponent ; who yet opposed only 

* Nov. Organ. Pt. I. Sect. 7- 






HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 141 

when that ancient philosophy was carried 
beyond, and out of its proper department — the 
cultivation of the powers of thought, into the 
discovery of the sciences. 

" The two faculties of reason and experience/' 
says Bacon, " should be properly joined and 
coupled together." Reason without experience 
(facts) he compares to a light bird ; Experience, 
without reason to a dull ass. It is better to be 
the bird than the ass ; it is best to be neither, 
and yet both. It is only by joining experience 
with reason that the ' sober certainty' of the 
quadruped can be coupled with the ' waking bliss,' 
the ecstatic heavenward flight, of the light and 
joyous bird. If, like Bacon, we were to en- 
deavour to read the fable of the Sphinx, we 
would say that it represents the wise mind, 
which has united reason and experience into a 
beautiful form ; comprehendible by man, but 
most hard to be comprehended. Its human 
head portrays that to intellectual man alone it is 
given to join together its other forms, the wings 
of a bird, reason ; and the body of a quadruped, 
experience. It is beautiful, for such union 
is the perfection of wisdom, and • O how 



142 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE* 

comely is wisdom !' It is cruel, for many 
lives must be sacrificed 'ere it can be dis- 
covered, or the problem of its nature be 
solved. 

Far different from the master himself, who 
saw in his philosophy the attainment of high 
and holy purposes, his pseudo-disciples shrink 
not from avowing that the material uses of 
philosophy are of higher import than the meta- 
physical. And it is because writers of no mean 
powers have, while setting themselves up as 
encomiasts and expounders of Baconism, 
utterly lost sight of the higher and godlike 
purposes which Bacon hoped to see his system 
promote, and have exalted only the simply 
mean and sordid uses, which, as tending to 
man's temporal comforts, Bacon's large heart 
also desired to increase, that we have so far 
enlarged our observations hereon ; and shall 
'ere we conclude, set a few extracts from these 
modern views of Baconism in opposition to 
those of Bacon himself. From these we shall 
see that, with regard to their views of the 
objects of philosophy, no two systems can be 
more opposed than that of Bacon himself, and 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 143 

that of the modern utilitarians, who dare to 
dub themselves his disciples. The latter 
seek in science nothing higher than base utili- 
tarianism, thus elevating the body at the ex- 
pense of the soul ; the former sought utilita- 
rianism in company with the attainment of 
pure truth and the investigation of the hidden 
secrets of nature, thus elevating both soul and 
body. 

It was the fault of the ancient philosophy 
that it endeavoured to elevate the soul at the 
expense of the body, and to separate that which 
God has joined together ; it is equally the fault 
— but a far more baneful one — of modern uti- 
litarianism that it endeavours to elevate the 
body above the soul, and treats the comfort of 
the former, as of far higher importance than 
the exaltation of the latter. 

Bacon alone, truly wise, sought the well- 
being of both ; and he alone pointed out that 
the well-being of both lay in the same path, 
and might be prosecuted simultaneously. While 
the ancient philosophy feared to defile the soul 
by contact with what was falsely called the base 
in nature, and the utilitarian dreads to have 



144 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSg. 

his sordid soul elevated above the same opera- 
tion!^— which he equally terms base, yet loves 
to degrade himself to — Bacon acknowledged 
nothing base in nature, and feared not to study 
her simplest and meanest operations in the 
pursuit of truth. He knew that whatever 
advances the soul makes in knowledge and 
wisdom, must be made through, and by means 
of the body ; therefore, the latter was not to be 
despised, but by all possible ways and means 
to be made the efficient hand-maid of the 
former. He knew that though the eye sees 
not, and the ear hears not, yet that the soul, 
in this mortal state, could neither see nor hear 
without them, and that by increasing their 
fact-transmitting powers, he was developing the 
fact-generating powers of the mind. 

It was for this reason that he contemned not 
to give his mind to experience, to making 
telescopes and ear-trumpets ; but nevertheless 
he did not regard them as the ultimate and 
sole end and aim of his philosophy. His views 
of the ends of philosophy were, as we shall pre- 
sently see, to the full as high and lofty as 
those of Plato and the Grecian philosophers ; 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 145 

he only sought to arrive at those ends by means 

different to those which they pursued. They 

both sought the same objects — Truth, and the 1 

i 
discovery of the secrets of nature ; but while the 

one foolishly did this by opposing nature, and 

acting in contradiction to her mandates, the 

other did it by following her patiently through 

all her devious windings. 

The modern Baconian school of utilitarians 
err in stopping half-way, and in mistaking 
what Bacon merely deemed media, for the ulti- 
mate ends of his philosophy. Whirled along 
by a steam-engine, informed by a telegraph, 
freed from pain by chloroform, the utilitarian 
deems such-like products of the inductive phi- 
losophy, to be the summum bonum of its 
founder ; forgetful that he considered such to 
be but the means to a higher end, and has said 
that " the summum bonum of human nature is 
the possession of truth, for this is a heaven I 
upon earth." 

But the better to understand this, let us con- 
trast modern Baconism with Bacon, — " ab uno 
disce omnes." 

Mr. T. B. Macaulay, a masterly and deserv- 

H 



146 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 

edly popular writer, has undertaken to give a 
more correct analysis of the objects of Baconism 
than is usually entertained ; but as it happens 
to be only an analysis of modern utilitarianism, 
we will avail ourselves of it as a contrast with 
Bacon's own aspirations of the benefits to be 
derived from his system.* 

Hear the utilitarian's version of Baconism in 
contrast with the ancient philosophy. 

" Plato, after speaking slightly of the conve- 
nience of arithmetic in the ordinary transactions 
of life, as to make men shop-keepers or pedlars, 
passes to what he considers as a far more im- 
portant advantage. It habituates the mind, he 
tells us, to the contemplation of pure truth, 
and raises us above the material universe ; and 
he advises his disciples to this study, in order 
that they may learn to fix their minds on the 
immutable essences of things. Bacon on the 
other hand, valued this branch of knowledge 



* Historical and Critical Essays, vol. n. The reader 
who wishes to form an estimate of the sordid views of 
the utilitarian school had better peruse the whole of 
Macaulay's Essay on Bacon. 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 147 

only on account of its uses with reference to the 
visible and tangible world. 

" Of mathematics, Plato says the real use 
is to lead men to the knowledge of abstract 
essential, eternal truth. Bacon valued mathe- 
matics chiefly, if not solely, on account of those 
uses which Plato deemed so base — its applica- 
tion to mechanics, &c. If Bacon erred here, 
we must acknowledge that we greatly prefer his 
error to the opposite error of Plato. 

" To sum up the whole," says this eulogist 
of w T hat he deems Baconism against the ancient 
philosophy as explained by Plato, " we should 
say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was 
to exalt man into a god. The aim of the Baco- 
nian philosophy, was to provide man with what 
he requires, while he continues to be man, and 
to supply his vulgar wants. The former aim 
was noble ; but the latter was attainable. Plato 
drew a good bow, but he aimed at the stars ; 
therefore the shot was thrown away. Bacon 
fixed his eye on a mark, which was placed on 
the earth, and within bow-shot, and hit it in 
the white." # 

* Essays, vol. ii. p. 386—403. 

H 2 



148 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE? 

If this were a true picture of Bacon's mind, 
how sad, and low, and grovelling, must it have 
been. Accustomed to grieve that he suffered 
his soul to be polluted by contact with the 
world, and bowed his heart beneath the love of 
ill-gotten gold, we have yet found consolation 
in the thought that the man and the philoso- 
pher were two ; and that we might dwell with 
rapture on the latter, take him to our heart, 
and make him our mind's companion without 
defiling ourselves with the former. But if this 
were a true picture of the philosopher, we must 
turn from him with disgust, as one whose soul 
was so imbued with the low and sordid, that no 
intellectual powers, how sublime soever, could 
elevate it above what was low and sordid, mean, 
and base. 

Sick at heart and disgusted with humanity 
we must turn with joy to him who sought ' to 
exalt man into a god,' who urged us ' to the con- 
templation of pure truth,' ■ to fix our minds on 
the immutable essences of things,' and ' the 
knowledge of the abstract, essential, eternal 
truth.' 

But thank God, it is not a true picture of 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 149 

Bacon's mind and purpose in revealing to the 
world a new philosophy. 

At most it is but one half the picture, and 
that the lower half. It exhibits the mouth only, 
the vehicle of the material things which sus- 
tain the body. Yet nevertheless not to be 
despised ; for without it the body could not 
live, and without the body, the mind could 
have no connection with mortal minds, and as 
to these must be dead also. But it entirely 
cuts off and conceals the upper half of the 
man ; the skull, the seat of mind, the resi- 
dence of that God-inspired particle, which 
alone ennobles and makes valuable the whole 
body. 

It is true that Bacon hoped by his philosophy 
to supply man's vulgar wants, and to make his 
sojourn here as easy and comfortable as was 
possible ; but he sought this only as a necessary 
and blessed accident by the way, and not as the 
end of his new learning. 

While he laboured to benefit mankind as 
mortal man, he also strove to elevate him as an 
immortal soul ; mindful of the origin of which, 



150 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE.-, 

he dared, like Plato, to hope to exalt man into 
a god, by leading the divine spirit, breathed 
into him when he was made in the image of 
God, to a contemplation and discovery of the 
secrets of the Great Artificer. 

It was a favourite text of Bacon's, " It is 
the glory of God to conceal a matter; it is 
the glory of the King (a man) to find it out." 
(Prov. 25, 2). 

Was not this very much like placing man 
almost on a parity with God, and exalting him 
into a god ? And again, even misquoting to 
suit his lofty notions of man's capabilities : 
" The spirit of man is as the lamp of God, 
wherewith He searches every secret."* (Prov. 
20, 27). Surely, too, the aim of him who de- 
scribes the sole end of his philosophy in the 
following words, is not different from that of 
him who urges his disciples " to fix their 
minds on the contemplation of the immutable 
essences of things." " The end of our foundation 
is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of 



* Filum Labyrinthi. 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 151 

things, and the enlarging of the bounds of 
human empire to the effecting of all things 
possible." # 

Neither does he differ at all from the philo- 
sopher of the Academy in his appreciation of 
pure truth. " Truth, which only doth judge 
itself, teacheth that the inquiry of Truth, which 
is the love-making or wooing of it ; the know- 
ledge of Truth, which is the presence of it ; and 
the belief of Truth, which is the enjoying of it ; 
is the sovereign good of human nature. The 
poet saith excellently well : ' It is a pleasure 
to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tossed 
upon the sea ; a pleasure to stand in the window 
of a castle, and to see a battle and the adven- 
tures thereof below ; but no pleasure is compa- 
rable to the standing upon the vantage ground 
of Truth, and to see the errors and wanderings, 
and mists and tempests in the sea below j'f so 



* New Atlantis. 

f Bacon would seem to have had this passage again 
in his mind, when he described Plato as " a man of a 
sublime genius, who took a view of everything as from a 
high rock." — De Augmentis, sec. 5. 



152 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. •> 

always that this prospect be with pity, and not 
with swelling or pride. Certainly it is heaven 
upon earth to have a man's mind move in 
charity, rest in providence, and turn upon the 
poles of Truth."* Is this the language of one 
who had no higher aim than " to supply man's 
vulgar wants, and whose eye was ever on a mark 
which was placed on earth and within bowshot ?" 
No ! long since must Bacon have been for- 
gotten, if his philosophy had had no higher end 
than that which modern utilitarianism deems its 
proudest boast. 

One more extract will suffice to evince, that 
in promoting the proper study of his favourite 
science, Natural Philosophy, he had far higher 
views than mere utilitarianism ; though this was 
to be regarded by the way and as an accident of 
no mean importance. "All knowledge, and 
especially that of natural philosophy, tendeth 
highly to the glory of God in His power, provi- 
dence and benefits appearing and engraven in 
His works, which without this knowledge are 



Essay on Truth. 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 153 

beheld but as through a veil, for if the heavens 
in the body of them do declare the glory of God 
to the eye, much more do they in the rule and 
decrees of them declare it to the under- 
standing." 5 * 

An apology is needed for this long episode on 
Bacon, and our apology must be an anxious 
desire to direct the student back from the false 
school of Baconism to the master himself. 
Leave the Macaulays, the Herschels and the 
Playfairs to the work — and an important and 
useful work it is — for which they are fitted ; but 
do you endeavour so to mind earthly things that 
you forget not heavenly things.f We say not, 
as did the ancient philosophers, disregard earthly 
things ; but, while attending to them, forget not 
the heavenly, as the utilitarians do. Neither 



* Filum Labyrinthi, Part i. 

t Earthly and heavenly are not here used, in the 
New Testament sense, for sinful and holy ; but in the 
Old Testament sense ; earthly, for things pertaining 
to the body formed of the dust of the ground, and 
heavenly, for things pertaining to the mind, the breath 
of God. 

H 3 



154 HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE." 

would it have been necessary to have entered so 
fully into the matter had we not been aware that 
of the thousands who pretend to tread in the 
steps of Bacon, not above one or two have ever 
read his more important works ; but take their 
notions of his philosophy from such crude and 
partial views as the merest utilitarians choose to 
enunciate as Baconian. 

We require no other proof of the degeneracy 
of modern mind from the close habits of intense 
thought which distinguished the predecessors 
and cotemporaries of Bacon, than the melancholy 
fact, that while the Novum Organum and De 
Augmentis were, in the author's time, eagerly 
read by every one pretending to a liberal educa- 
tion, and at once elevated him to a high rank 
among literary men, they are scarcely ever 
opened in the present day, " and though much 
talked of are but little read. They have pro- 
duced indeed a vast effect on the opinions of 
mankind, but they have produced it through the 
operation of intermediate agents."* Of these 



* Macaulay's Essay on Bacon, vol. n., p. 426, 



HOW TO GET A COGITATIVE NOSE. 155 

intermediate agents we have given a few speci- 
mens ; and as long as the world submits to 
receive their version of Baconism, so long will 
Baconism elevate Knowledge at the expense of 
True Wisdom. Let men return to Bacon, and 
take all that he teaches instead of part — the 
inferior part — and there will be nothing for 
Wisdom or Knowledge to fear. 



CHAPTER VI. 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 



Class IV. — The Jewish, or Hawk, Nose is very con- 
vex, and preserves its convexity, like a bow, through- 
out the whole length from the eyes to the tip. It 
is thin and sharp. 

It indicates considerable Shrewdness in worldly mat- 
ters ; and deep insight into character, and facility of 
turning that insight to profitable account. 

This is a good, useful, practical Nose, very 
able to carry its owner successfully through the 
world, that is as success is now-a-days measured, 
by weight of purse; nevertheless it will not 
elevate him to any very exalted pitch of intel- 
lectuality. 

It is called the Jewish Nose in conformity 
with long-established nomenclature, and is, per- 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 157 

haps, more frequent among the Jews than 
among most other nations resident in Europe. 
It is, however, a fallacy to suppose that the 
peculiar physiognomy called Jewish is confined 
to the Jews, or even exclusively characteristic of 
them. It is in fact a form of profile common 
to all the inhabitants of Syria ; and Sir G. 
Wilkinson has proved in his erudite work on 
Ancient Egypt, that the nations represented in 
the Egyptian sculptures with this cast of coun- 
tenance are not always intended for Jews, as 
was at one time supposed, but for Syrians. 
Moreover, this form of countenance is to 
this day, the usual one among the Arabs 
of that part of the world. This Nose should 
therefore more properly be called the Syrian 
Nose. 

This fact enables us to extend our illustra- 
tions, by adducing divers national proofs of 
the correctness of the indications ascribed to 
this Nose. 

We have said that it is a good, useful, 
practical Nose, i. e. a good money-getting 
Nose, a good commercial Nose, and perhaps 
the latter term would be an apt secondary 



158 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

designation for it. Hence, those nations which 
have been most largely gifted with it, have 
been always celebrated for their commercial 
success. 

The Phoenicians were Syrians, and the por- 
traits which we have of these people on the 
Egyptian sculptures, as read by Sir G. Wil- 
kinson, all exhibit this form of Xose. It is 
unnecessary to enlarge on the very early com- 
mercial activity of this nation, on its extensive 
traffic, its flourishing colonies, and its mighty 
fleets. While the rest of the world was in 
barbarism, or kept their low civilization care- 
fully locked up within their own dominions, 
the Phoenicians were spreading arts and letters 
among the barbarous nations of Europe, and 
carrying civilization forward on its destined 
course towards the West. And the incentive 
to this and the means whereby it was effected 
were the same as those which now animate 
modern Tyre to promote the same Westward 
tendency of civilization. What Phoenicia, a 
little corner of Asia, did for Europe, England, 
a little corner of Europe, has done and is 
doing for lands still further West — America 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 159 

and Austral- Asia ; destined to be in their 
turns the seats of a still progressive civil- 
ization, until every part of the earth shall 
have been in succession blessed with a civil- 
ization, if not always equal in degree, always 
adequate to its age, requirements, and ca- 
pacity. 

Then when the whole circle shall have been 
accomplished — and of which more than two- 
thirds have been already passed over — when 
civilization in Austral-Asia shall touch the 
confines of its original starting-point, the 
Eastern shores of India, the consummation of all 
things shall be at hand ; the purpose for which 
the earth was created, and for which millions of 
years have been slowly, surely, and silently 
beautifying, storing, and adapting it, until it 
is like " the Garden of the Lord," shall have 
been fulfilled; and the whole of this beautiful 
system shall vanish away like a breath, yet 
leave no vacuity, no defect, in the vast and 
mighty universe, whose limits utterly transcend 
our notions of time and space. 

Two-thirds of this circle have been already 



160 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

passed over ; the remaining third is rapidly 
running out ; we already stand half-way be- 
tween the beginning and the end of this third 
part ; nay, we are nearer the end than the 
beginning; we see more clearly and apprehend 
more closely the day when Austral- Asia shall 
be the seat of civilization and Christianity, than 
we do the day when those blessings seventeen 
hundred years ago, first landed on our shores ; 
we feel more affinity for, and more sympathy 
with the latter age than with the former, and we 
may be assured that we do this because we are 
much nearer in Time to the one than to the 
other. 

This is an awful contemplation ; we cannot 
but feel that there is an extra responsibility 
cast upon us upon whom literally " the ends 
of the world are come," and that it concerns 
us more than all who have gone before to be 
up and be doing; to take heed that while 
civilization is progressing geographically, it is 
also progressing in power and character; for 
upon the extent and nature of the Knowledge 
which we transmit, depend in a great degree 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 161 

the extent and nature of the Knowledge which 
shall ever reign on the earth. 

Theologically considered, the subject is in- 
finitely more awful and important; and the 
mind cannot contemplate without fear and 
trembling, what may be the consequences if 
we, instead of a pure and perfect, transmit 
to the few generations yet to subsist on 
the earth, an impure and imperfect Chris- 
tianity. 

But to return to our more immediate sub- 
ject. The Jews have always been celebrated 
for shrewdness in commercial affairs. Though 
the peculiarities of their religion prevented them 
from taking a leading part in the general 
commercial business of the ancient world, yet 
among themselves trade always flourished ; and 
in the present age of the world, the Jews were 
in all countries the first revivers of commerce 
after the stagnation occasioned by the irruptions 
of the northern hordes, and in many nations 
are still almost the only traders. 

It does not always follow, however, that the 
love and capacity for getting money is accom- 
panied by a sordid disinclination to part with it. 



162 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

Numerous instances occur of persons who 
shrewdly bargain for pence, but liberally give 
away pounds. As we may seem to have in- 
ferred that the former is a Jewish habit, it is 
right, and we are happy to be able to say, that 
some instances of princely liberality among 
modern Jews, afford lessons which Christians 
would do well to take. 

No very exalted intellectuality is to be looked 
for from the Syrian nose. Its sphere of action 
is widely different from that of mental exertion 
for the mere pleasure thence derivable. Hence, 
we find, that notwithstanding the free inter- 
course which the Phoenicians permitted with 
all nations, the ancient sages rarely travelled 
to Phoenicia for learning. If they went there, 
they went like Solomon, to traffic. They 
sought learning among the Chaldeans, the 
Indians and the Egyptians, but seldom touched 
in their course on the more accessible shores 
of Phoenicia. The Phoenicians have had the 
reputation of being the inventors of letters 
because they introduced them into Europe ; 
but they were the mere carriers of them for 
commercial purposes, not the inventors. 






OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 163 

Though some attempts have been lately 
made to prove that the Hebrew nation has 
furnished more learned men than any other, 
the attempts are an utter failure. 

Curious wranglers, ingenious cabalists, fine 
splitters of hairs, shrewd pervert ers of texts, 
sharp detecters of discrepancies, clever con- 
cocters of analogies, finders of mysteries in 
a sun-beam, constitute the mass of modern* 
Jewish scholars. What is the Talmud, the 
Mishna, the Gemara, or any of their comments 
thereon, or on Scripture, but mere puerile exer- 
cises of wit; sometimes ingenious, but always 
reckless of truth, decency or common sense ? 
We search in vain, as far as our knowledge of 
their works extends, and as all those who 
have studied them assert, for any expanded 
views, any comprehensive ideas or extensive 
learning. Neither does their ancient history 
furnish any but inspired names, to class among 
the world's sages. 

Education is however rapidly extending among 



* i, e. Post Christum. 



164 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

the Jews. For the first time since they ceased 
to be a nation they appear to begin to feel the 
importance of raising themselves to an equal 
intellectual rank with the citizens among whom 
their lot is cast. 

Numerous schools have recently been founded 
by them for the education of their own people 
— both male and female — in England and 
other European States. From these the most 
beneficial results may be anticipated. 

It has always been found to be the greatest 
obstacle to the spread of Christianity among 
a people who a priori might be supposed to 
be the most ready to receive it as a proof of 
the truth and fulfilment of their own Scrip- 
tures, that they know not these Scriptures ; but 
are either immersed in the grossest ignorance, 
or glean their religion from the Talmud and 
the Mishna. It has been justly said, " The 
Jews must be made Old Testament Jews before 
they can be made Christians ;" and this can 
only be done by education among themselves 
creating a spontaneous spirit of inquiry into 
their own literature, with an anxious desire 
to read and comprehend the vast storehouse 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 



165 



of Biblical treasure at present almost unknown 
to the large majority of them. 

The sources of our individual illustrations 
treating only of those who have distinguished 
themselves in Literature or History furnish 
only a few examples of the Jewish Nose. 

Vespasian, 
Correggio, 
Adam Smith, 



may serve, however, to illustrate and corroborate 
our theory. As to the last, the connection 




ADAM SMITH. 



between his Nose and the peculiar bias of his 
mind is obvious. 



166 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

"The founder of the Science of Political 
Economy 5 ' must have possessed a natural at- 
traction towards commercial affairs; and it 
could only have been by a very large share 
of acute observation and shrewd penetration 
that he could have worked out the principles 
of so abstruse a science, and made it acceptable 
to the mass of mankind. 

" It was," says one of his admirers, " one of 
the few, but greatest, errors of Adam Smith, 
that he was too apt to consider man as a 
mere money-making animal, who will never 
hesitate to work provided he is well paid 
for it. He does not consider that the desire 
of power and of esteem are more powerful 
principles than the desire of wealth." 

It is impossible to desire a description of 
his character more exactly correspondent to 
the form of his Nose. 

It has been much disputed among his 
biographers whether Correggio was rich or 
poor. Many anecdotes are related which in- 
dicate his extreme poverty ; while on the other 
hand, numerous facts seem to prove that he 
must at least have been in easv circumstances. 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 167 

He married a lady of good fortune, and he 
was well appreciated in his own time, and 
received many valuable orders for paintings 
from patrons of high rank and great liberality. 
It is however undisputed that his disposition 
was penurious and miserly, and this fact — 
indicated also by his unusually well-developed 
hawk-nose — will serve to reconcile the appa- 
rently contradictory assertions of his bio- 
graphers. 




"%c. 



CORREGGIO. 



It is probable that, like most misers, he 
was always complaining of poverty, and even 
denied himself necessaries which he could have 
well afforded. Those who credited these com- 
plaints, recorded his poverty and lamented over 



168 OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 

it with mistaken kindness ; while others, who 
more critically considered his actual means, 
would better appreciate them and reveal the 
true state of the case. There is an anecdote 
recorded of him by his friend and cotemporary, 
Vasari, which though it may not be wholly 
true, has probably some foundation. It is 
not, however, as Gibbon has shrewdly re- 
marked, of much importance whether an anec- 
dote of a person is actually true or false ; 
for it almost equally displays the character 
of the person of whom it is recorded. A 
tale of liberality is not told of a known 
miser ; nor an instance of penuriousness of 
a liberal man. An anecdote, to be received, 
must at least be probable and have an air 
of verisimilitude. Neither, considering the 
character of Correggio, is there any such in- 
consistency in the story as to render it in- 
credible. The objection that sixty crowns in 
copper would weigh two hundred pounds, and 
therefore be an impossible weight for a man 
to carry, is a mere quibble. It only proves 
that the quantity is exaggerated, and not that 
the main story is false. 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 169 

This characteristic anecdote is to the effect, 
that having received a payment of sixty crowns 
in copper, he carried it home on foot in sultry 
weather, and the over-fatigue brought on a 
fever, of which he died. 



VESPASIAN. 

(From a coin in the Museum of Florence.)* 

The character of Vespasian has been painted 
in the brightest colours. Avarice alone sullied 

* This head enables us to point out a characteristic 
difference between the convexity of the Jewish Nose 
and the Roman. The convexity of the former com- 
mences at the eyes, and if afterwards it aquiiines, the 
Nose is JL or ~, according as I. or IV. prevails. The 
convexity of the Roman Nose is confined to the centre 
of the Nose, and occasions its aquilineness. 

I 



170 OF THE JEWISH NOSE, 

his virtues. This must have been no slight or 
temporary blot, or his eulogist and client, 
Tacitus, would not have recorded it. It was 
too palpable and notorious to be concealed, and 
the historian found himself, however reluctantly, 
compelled to confess it. 

It is not improbable, that he inherited this 
vice ; for his father, having saved money in the 
business of a collector of the revenue and 
retired from the office, was unable to resist the 
love of gain, and subsequently acquired a con- 
siderable fortune by lending money at usurious 
interest. The prudence and sagacity with 
which the young Vespasian regulated his con- 
duct during the dangerous reigns of the brutal 
Caligula and Nero, indicates his penetration and 
sagacity. It must have been by no trifling tact 
and ingenuity that he escaped death for the 
heinous offence of appearing inattentive while 
the Emperor Nero was singing. The same 
shrewdness and insight into character enabled 
him while in a private station to redeem his 
ruined fortune by horse- dealing ; a science 
always notorious for its unscrupulous scheming 
and dishonest sharp practice ; and in which the 



OF THE JEWISH NOSE. 171 

hawk-nosed Syrian Arabs have ever excelled all 
other nations. 

Titus, the successor and son of Vespasian, 
inherited his father's profile, and it is a marked 
corroboration of our theory that avarice is the 
only vice attributed to that otherwise virtuous 
prince. 

It must however be observed, that the Noses, 
both of Vespasian and his son, were not purely 
Jewish, but Judceo-Roman ~ ; a formation 
which corresponds accurately with other pecu- 
liarities in the characters of those great gene- 
rals, too well known to need further eluci- 
dation. 



I 2 



CHAPTER VII. 

OF THE SNUB NOSE AND THE CELESTIAL 
NOSE. 

Classes V. and VI. — The Snub Nose and the Turn- 
Up (poetic^) Celestial Nose. 

The form of the former is sufficiently indicated by its 
name. The latter is distinguished by its presenting 
a continuous concavity from the eyes to the tip. It 
is converse in shape to the Jewish Nose. N.B. It 
must not be confounded with a Nose which, belonging 
to one of the other Classes in the upper part, termi- 
nates in a slight distension of the tip ; for this, so 
far from prejudicing the character, rather adds to it 
warmth and activity. 

We associate the Snub and the Celestial in nearly the 
same category, as they both indicate natural weak- 
ness ; mean, disagreeable petty disposition ; with petty 
insolence, and divers other characteristics of con- 
scious weakness, which strongly assimilate them 



OF THE SNUB AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 173 

(indeed, a true Celestial Nose is only a Snub turned 
up) ; while their general poverty of distinctive cha- 
racter, makes it almost impossible to distinguish their 
psychology. Nevertheless, there is a difference 
between their indications ; arising, however, rather 
from degree than character. The Celestial is, by 
virtue of its greater length, decidedly preferable to 
the Snub, as it has all the above unfortunate propen- 
sities in a much less degree, and is not without some 
share of small shrewdness and fox- like common 
sense ; on which, however, it is apt to presume, 
and is, therefore, a more impudent Nose than the 
Snub. 

It is with considerable distaste and reluctance 
that we approach the latter divisions of our 
Classification. Poenitet me hujus Nasi. We 
wish we had never undertaken to write of these 
Noses. Having done so, however, we must 
fulfil our engagement. But the mind shrinks 
from the thought, that after contemplating 
the powerful Roman-nosed movers of the 
world's destinies, or the refined and elegant 
Greek-nosed arbiters of art, or the deep and 
serious-minded thinkers with Cogitative Noses, 
it must descend to the horrid bathos, the imbe- 
cile inanity of the Snub. 



174 OF THE SNUB NOSE 

Perhaps the reader expects that we are going 
to be very funny on the subject of these Noses. 
But we are not ; — far from it. A Snub Nose 
is to us a subject of most melancholy contem- 
plation. We behold in it a proof of the 
degeneracy of the human race. We feel that 
such was not the shape of Adam's Nose ; that 
the original type has been departed from ; that 
the depravity of man's heart has extended 
itself to his features, and that, to parody 
Cowper's line, purloined, by the bye, from 
Cowley : — 

" God made the Roman, and man made the Snub." 

Fortunately for our hypothesis, and for our 
feelings, we cannot find a single instance of the 
existence of either the Celestial or the Snub 
among celebrated persons, except in those who 
are illustrious by courtesy rather than by their 
actions, and whom station, not worth, has made 
conspicuous. The following are the only 
instances of the Celestial Nose which our pic- 
torial sources furnish : — 

James I. 

Richard Cromwell. 



AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 175 

Mary, wife of William III. 

George I. 

Kosciusko. 




Peculiar circumstances won Kosciusko some- 
what of a name, for it was rather from sym- 
pathy with his cause than from admiration of 
his abilities, that it was ever bruited in men's 
mouths, or is yet remembered. Had he been 
gifted with a Roman Nose, that is, had his 
soul been Roman, energetic, dignified and self- 
reliant, Poland might have risen again into the 
rank of nations. But he submitted to crouch 
beneath the rod of Napoleon, temporizing and 
treating for benefits for which it was his duty 
to have fought ; and the nation, which looked 



176 OF THE SNUB NOSE 

to him for assistance, was compelled to share 
his degraded fate, and become the despised 
tool of an all-grasping despot. He had, how- 
ever, a share of the Cogitative with the Celes- 
tial ; and thus affords an instance of an union 
so rare, that it is only to be regarded as an 
exception to the rule laid down, that Class III 
is never associated with V and VI. 

From fictitious works, which have raised to 
celebrity imaginary characters of every mental 
calibre, innumerable examples might be adduced ; 
for all accurate observers, whether ancient or 
modern, have — without being professed Xasolo- 
gists — unconsciously verified our hypothesis, and 
associated the Nose with character. 

The inimitable Dickens, and his equally clever 
illustrator Cruikshank, both of whom owe their 
power to their correct observation and deline- 
ation of character, afford manv well-known 
examples. Had the hypothesis been founded 
on Oliver Twist and its illustrations, it could 
not have been more strikingly substantiated by 
them, than it is — thus proving that if we err, 
we err in company with observers of more 
than common accuracy, and whose observations 



AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 177 

have been verified by the applauses of all. In i y ? #'| 
that work we have the shrewd penetrative Jew ftS/i-ff" 
with his Hawk-nose ; the mild, but high- 
minded Oliver Twist, with his fine Greek nose ; 
the Artful Dodger and his brother-pals with 
their characteristic Snubs and Celestials. A 
reference to the plates, and the author's 
pen-and-ink portraits, in this and other works, 
will confirm our right to claim Dickens as a 
Nasologist. 

The only authority which we have consulted 
on the subject of Noses, is one from whose 
works we have already quoted. It never can 
be forgotten that the inimitable Tristram 
Shandy has slightly touched upon the subject 
when describing the unhappy catastrophe which, 
even in his very earliest years, demolished 
his Nose. 

It appears that Mr. Shandy senior, was a 
sagacious, an observant, and a learned man. 
We need not add, therefore, that he was deeply 
imbued with the importance of his son having 
a good Nose ; and most pathetic was his sorrow 
when the bridge of it was broken. His own 
family had suffered through several generations 

I 3 



178 OF THE SNUB NOSE 

from a defect in the length of an ancestor's 
^ Nose. His great-grandfather, when tendering 
his hand and heart to the lady who afterwards 
consented to make him " the happiest of men/' 
was forced to capitulate to her terms, owing to 
the brevity of his Nose. 

" It is most unconscionable, Madam," said 
he, " that you, who have only two thousand 
pounds to your fortune, should demand from 
me an allowance of £300 a year." 
" Because you have no Nose, Sir." 
" 'Sdeath ! Madam, 'tis a very good Nose." 
" 'Tis for all the world like an ace-of- 
clubs." 

"My great grandfather was silenced:" and 
for many years after the Shandy family was 
burdened with the payment of this large 
annuity out of a small estate, because his great 
great-grandfather had a Snub Nose. Well might 
Mr. Shandy (the father of Tristram) say " that 
no family, however high, could stand against 
a succession of short Noses !" 

In lack of other instances, we have intro- 
duced those of fictitious writers ; for they cor- 
roborate our views, and serve to thicken other 



AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 179 

proofs which in this Class do demonstrate thinly. 
And this necessarily so. For we have de- 
termined to refrain from giving examples from 
our personal acquaintance, and the Snubs have 
never any of them won such eminence, as to 
have their names handed down by fame, or 
their portraits limned for the benefit of pos- 
terity. The evidence in these two last Classes 
is necessarily negative. 

Their best proof lies in their want of proofs. 
The Snub will, however, receive some general 
illustration when we come to speak of national 
Noses. 

It now only remains to treat of some ob- 
stinate Noses which will not come within our 
classification. 

One of these is that curious formation, a 
compound of Roman, Greek, Cogitative, and 
Celestial, with the addition of a button at the 
end, prefixed to the front of my Lord Brougham. 
We are bound from its situation to admit that 
it is a Nose, and we must, therefore, treat of it ; 
but it's a queer one. " Sure such a Nose 
was never seen." 



180 OF THE SNUB NOSE 

It is a most eccentric nose ; it comes within 
no possible category ; it is like no other man's ; 
it has good points, and bad points, and no 
point at all. When you think it is going 
right on for a Roman, it suddenly becomes a 
Greek ; when you have written it down Cogi- 
tative, it becomes as sharp as a knife. At 
first view it seems a Celestial ; but Celestial it 
is not ; its Celestiality is not heavenward, but 
right out into illimitable space, pointing — we 
know not where. It is a regular Proteus ; 
when you have caught it in one shape, it 
instantly becomes another. Turn it, and twist 
it, and view it how, when, or where you will, 
it is never to be seen twice in the same shape, 
and all you can say of it is, that it's a queer 
one. And such exactly is my Lord Brougham ; 
— verily my Lord Brougham, and my Lord 
Brougham's Nose have not their likeness in 
heaven or earth — and the button at the end is 
the cause of it all. 

Thus, though Lord Brougham's Nose is an 
exception to our classification, it is not, as has 
been asserted, an exception to our system. On 
the contrary, it is manifestly a strong corrobo- 



AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 181 

ration of it. The only exceptions are those 
where the character does not correspond 
with the Nose, and of those we have yet to 
hear. 

There is another Nose which is not included 
in the classification, but which, though not 
peculiar to one individual, is nevertheless not 
sufficiently frequent to demand placing there. 
This we call the Parabolic Nose. It would 
have been a good Nose if it had gone on as 
it began ; but, having from some cause taken 
an inward curve too soon, its good qualities 
become nearly nullified. It presents a con- 
tinued Parabolic curve, where it ought to ex- 
tend into an angular tip. This sudden abbre- 
viation of course weakens the character, but, as 
it leaves the good qualities of the upper part 
still inherent, the character retains good points ; 
but being disabled from reasoning justly on 
its good intentions, it acquires the character 
of obstinacy, and of acting from pig-headedness, 
instead of from rational forethought. 

George III. presents the best-known example 
of this Nose. 

Another striking example occurs in Blanco 



182 OF THE SNUB NOSE 

White. There were considerable points of 
identity between their characters. 

They were both honest, conscientious men, 
anxious to find out and pursue the right course, 
but both were too hasty in jumping to conclu- 
sions to form accurate judgments. Blanco 
White, anxious to embrace truth, led a regular 
harlequin dance after her all his life, and died in 
motley. One leg red and the other blue, with 
a jacket of various colours, and a coxcomb of 
brilliant self-conceit. His last verdict, after 
rambling through divers forms of religion and 
no-religion, was, " I am neither Trinitarian, nor 
Unitarian, nor yet Arian." First Roman 
Catholic, then Atheist, then Church of England. 
then Unitarian, then Arian, then Omniarian, his 
ardent, hasty mind settled like a butterfly on the 
first bright flower which fluttered in the breeze, 
for a time imbibed and luxuriated on its honey, 
and then flew off to suck the sweets of some 
other plant. Thus he fluttered on, a varied, 
anxious, unsettled existence, gathering honey, 
but making none ; and when the colds and 
storms of winter came, he sank before them. 

The instances of the Parabolic Xose are, how- 



AND THE CELESTIAL NOSE. 183 

ever, too few to justify deductions from it, and 
we would rather, at present, not express de- 
cidedly what are its indications. Should we 
be able to do so at any future time it will be 
entitled to stand as Class VII. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

OF FEMININE NOSES. 

The subject of Nasology would not be com- 
plete without some observations on the Feminine 
Nose, because sex modifies the indications, 
some of which, though disagreeable and re- 
pulsive in a man, are rather pleasing, fasci- 
nating and bewitching in a woman, and vice 
versd. 

It is the fashion for women to aspire to 
equality with the other sex, and as long as 
they will be content with an equality, in a 
different orbit, they are undoubtedly entitled to 
it. It should, however, be the equality of 
planets — each perfect and beautiful, each useful 
and beneficial in its sphere ; but pregnant with 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 185 

disorder and confusion when Venus would in- 
vade the orbit of Jupiter, or intrude within the 
circuit of Mars. 

No intelligent man denies to woman such an 
equality ; but as certainly as a good housewife 
would pin a dish-cloth to the coat-tail of a 
husband prying into the mysteries of the kitchen 
and claiming equality with his wife in the house- 
hold sphere, so surely will men cry out against 
and turn with disgust from women who invade 
their province of warriors, statesmen, mer- 
chants, &c. 

Nevertheless, let us not be misunderstood, or 
be accused of including in a sweeping clause 
those cases which are, of right, exceptions. A 
woman may be placed in such a position that 
active life is her legitimate sphere, and that if 
she neglects or devolves its cares upon others 
she is culpable. We all feel an enthusiastic re- 
spect for the noble Boadicea, arousing her pusil- 
lanimous countrymen against the cruel ravages 
of the Romans, and dwell with admiration on 
Elizabeth haranguing her army at Tilbury and 
personally engaging in affairs of State, because 



186 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

they were occupied in duties which became a 
monarch; yet if a woman, who has no call to 
any higher duties than those of domestic life, 
were to leave them to engage in the contests of 
warriors or the turmoil of politics, we should 
regard her as an unfeminine virago. Notwith- 
standing, though the woman may in some cases 
be needfully sunk in the station, those duties 
which become the former will still engage more 
of our love and regard than those which belong 
to the latter 5 and our own graceful Queen has 
secured, by her happy union of the duties of 
both, more of the love and respect of her people 
than any of her predecessors on the throne of 
these realms. 

The energies and tastes of women are gene- 
rally less intense than those of men ; hence their 
characters appear less developed and exhibit 
greater uniformity That their passions are 
stronger is undeniable, but these do not consti- 
tute character, nor are exhibited in the Xose. 
Their indexes are the eyes and mouth, and 
therefore their consideration forms no part oi the 
present subject. This uniformity of character 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 187 

is noticed by Pope in a line which at first sight 
reads libellous, either because it appears to refer 
to moral conduct — which it does not — or be- 
cause it is too sweeping and exaggerated. He 
asserts roundly, 

" Most women have no characters at all." 

No characters at all is obviously false ; but, as 
compared to men, as near the truth as most 
general epigrammatic rules are. It is in the 
latter sense that Pope used it to illustrate the 
difficulty of discussing "The characteristics of 
Women " after a dissertation on those of men. 
The line, however, was truer in his time than it 
is now, when more general and more liberal 
education has tended very much to break up the 
uniformity of character which existed among 
the inane ladies of Pope's era. 

Nevertheless, whether repressed by Art or 
curtailed by Nature, women's characters certainly 
appear less developed than those of men. If 
by Nature, it is a blessed provision — as all 
nature's providings are. It is the woman's place 
to be in rational subjection to the man ; and 
though the sweet saints would sooner tear out 



188 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

the eyes of St. Paul # (we wonder he is such a 
favourite with them) than confess his precepts 
in terms, yet they do not fear to acknowledge 
that they have no respect for the man who 
succumbs to his wife, or admiration for the 
woman who aspires to denude her husband of 
his appropriate symbols of masterdom. 

If this happy inferiority — an inferiority 
which places them far above men in practical 
wisdom, inasmuch as it consists in shrewd, 
practical common sense, against man's intel- 
lectual blundering — if this happy inferiority is 
the result of Art, they exhibit in its adoption 
much sound wisdom. Man is an insolent, 
domineering, self-sufficient animal — let him 
say what he will about the elevation of the 
female mind, we believe no man ever fell in love 
with the woman whom he felt to be wiser than 
himself. He could not endure for a partner for 
life, such a perpetual looking-glass, and reminder 
of his own infirmities ; he could not bear the 
constant attestation of his own weakness. He 



* Ephes. v.. 22—24. 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 189 

could regard patiently the vaunted accomplish- 
ments of another man, but he could not submit 
that his wife should be his acknowledged supe- 
rior, and to be her foil — perhaps fool. 

Hence it is that wise men so frequently, that it 
is become proverbial, marry silly women. How- 
ever much a learned man may admire female ac- 
complishments, he detests a woman who strives 
to rival him in his own sphere, who is talking 
philosophy when he would be whispering "soft 
nothings/' and who freezes his ardent admira- 
tion with a dissertation on mathematics, or a 
moral discourse on self-controL He can bend, 
like any other man, with intense joy, over the 
blushing girl who tremblingly believes that her 
eyes are brighter and more lovely than the stars 
over her head; but would fling from him with 
disgust the woman who would repress his harm- I 
less and true — because soul-felt — flattery, with 
a philosophical disquisition on the nature, 
distances, and offices of the aforesaid stars. 
And it is because learned women too often strive 
by this injudicious ill-timed wisdom, to catch 
learned men for husbands, (and there are no 



190 OF FEMININE NOSES. 



, 



.more determined husband-hunters than blue- 
l stocking women, because they are always within 
a year or two of being shelved), that the latter 
are necessarily flung into the arms of women 
who they know can't bore them with an eternal 
round of sense, from w 7 hich every one is glad 
occasionally to escape, and never more so than 
when he is in love. 

Hence it is that blue-stocking women are 
proverbially avoided by men ; not because men 
despise or dislike their learning, but because 
they make such ill-timed use of it. They may 
be admired, but they are never loved ; they 
may talk as wise and as learned as is in their 
power, but learning and wisdom never won a 
lover, much less a husband. Ver. sap. my 
dear lady reader, and if you don't understand 
the abbreviate, ask — ask — anybody, but your 
husband. 



" Yes Love, indeed, is light from heaven, 
A spark of that immortal fire, 
By angels shared, to mortals given, 
To lift from earth our low desire." 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 191 

And shall heaven-born love bow to mortal 
wisdom? Shall the God whom Jove himself 
obeys, become the slave of Minerva ? No ! let 
Love wear the cap and bells of Folly, but shroud 
him not in the cold cerements of the Goddess 
of Wisdom ! Be assured, the doves of Venus 
will never nestle under the dusky wings of the 
sage owl of innupta Minerva, who, herself, 
could never win a husband, or a lover, from the 
whole host of Olympus. 

Whatever the cause, it is almost indisputable 
that women's characters are generally less 
developed than those of men ; and this fact 
accurately accords with the usual development 
of their Noses. But for a small hiatus in the 
prosody, Pope's line would read equally well 
thus : — 

" Most women have no Noses at all," 

Not, of course, that the nasal appendage is 
wanting, any more than Pope intended by the 
original line that women's characteristics were 
wholly negative ; but that, like their characters, 



192 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

their Noses are, for the most part, cast in a 
smaller and less developed mould than the 
Nose masculine. 

In judging of the Nose feminine, therefore, 
comparison must not be made with the mascu- 
line, hut with other feminine Noses. All the 
rules and classifications apply to the one as well 
as the other, but allowance is to be made for 
sex. 

The Roman Nose largely developed in a 
woman mars beauty, and imparts a hardness 
and masculine energy to the face which is 
unpleasing, because opposed to our ideas of 
woman's softness and gentle temperament. In 
a man we admire stern energy and bold inde- 
pendence, and can even forgive, for their sakes, 
somewhat of coarseness ; but in a woman the 
former are, at the least, unprepossessing and un- 
feminine, and the latter is utterly intolerable. 
Woman's best sustainer is a pure mind ; man's 
a bold heart. 

Moreover, the exhibition of character in 
women should be different from that in men. 
From the masculine Roman Nose we may 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 193 

justly look for energy in the active departments 
of life, but in a woman its indications are appro- 
priately exhibited in firmness and regularity 
in those duties which legitimately fall to her 
lot. We do not desire to see a woman so 
endowed launch out, uncalled for, into the 
bustle and turmoil of the world, or endeavour 
to take the reins of government from her 
husband, though she may be equally well fitted 
for the task: but we are content to see her 
govern her household with energy, and train 
up her children in a systematic and uniform 
manner. 

She will form her plans of household ma- 
nagement with promptitude, and carry them 
out with undeviating firmness and decision : 
and her husband will act wisely, for his own 
sake, not to interfere with her, so long as 
her energy does not carry her into his depart- 
ment. 

But if woman's circumstances place her 
in a more extended sphere, her career will 
afford an example to illustrate our hypothesis 
as well as that of a man. Of this we have an 

K 



194 OF FEMININE NOSES, 

example in the illustrious Roman Lady, Livia, 
the wife of Augustus. 



^fiigiiiiiifc -. 




LIVIA. 

(From a coin in tlte Muteum of tlor< uce. y 

Her nose presents a combination of the 
Roman and the Greek, and contains as much 
of the former class as is compatible with female 
beauty. The accounts which are handed down 
concerning her are very contradictory : some 
describing her as chaste as the icicle that hangs 
on Dian's temple, and qualified to lead a chorus of 
vestals, while others accuse her of licentiousn 
and criminal amours. It is, however, un- 
deniable that she was a woman of considerable 
power of mind, which she exercised ener- 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 195 

getically and shrewdly in procuring the ag- 
grandizement of her son Tiberius, on whose 
head she finally succeeded in placing the im- 
perial tiara. Her Roman energy was never- 
theless refined by an infusion of Greek elegance, 
and she was a liberal patroness of arts and 
literature. Her career likewise illustrates 
another maxim ; that what woman's character 
wants in development, is often compensated 
by superior passion. Livia was sustained more 
by the strength of her affections than by per- 
sonal ambition. It was her son's and not her 
own aggrandizement that she sedulously pur- 
sued; and if the lives of the majority of 
ambitious women were examined, it would be 
found that they more frequently sought to 
exalt some object of their affections — a husband 
or a child — than themselves. 

This, however, was not the case with 
the purely Roman -Nosed Elizabeth. She 
had no affection for any one but herself; 
and the energy and determination, combined 
with the coarseness of her character, corres- 
pond accurately with the indications of her 
Nose. 

K 2 



196 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 



The most beautiful form of Nose in woman 
is the Greek. It is essentially a feminine 
Nose, and it is in its higher indications that 
women generally excel. 

This Nose will not carry them out of their 
natural sphere, and it is for this reason that it 
is so beautiful. Congruity is harmony ; and 
harmony is essential to the beautiful. A 
woman gifted with the feelings of a poet, need 
not fear to give them full sway. In some of 
the most beautiful and touching departments 
of poetic talent women equal — perhaps excel — 
men. Scarcely half a century has elapsed since 
women were permitted to cultivate unreservedly 
the fields of literature, but that brief period 
has incontrovertibly proved the ability of 
women to pourtray with superior truth and 
pathos all that relates to the affections, the 
sentiments, and the moral and religious duties 
of mankind. 

The names of Hannah More, Barbauld. 
Edgeworth, Tighe, Hemans, De Stael, and other 
lamented writers, together with those of several 
who still survive, place this assertion beyond 
the pale of controversy. The Noses of the 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 197 

above-named gifted women were Greco- Cogi- 
tative. 




MRS, HEMANS. 



But the power of expression, though essential 
to a poet, is not necessary to a poetic mind. It 
may exist as strongly in one who has no words 
of fire to give its creations utterance as in one 
who pours forth in lavish self-abandonment the 
riches of his soul. Neither is the Greek Nose 
a necessary index of a poetic faculty. That form 
may adorn the face, but no rapturous fervour 
exalt the mind; although it will frequently 
accompany a poetic temperament, because it 
indicates refinement and purity of taste. These 
are its invariable indications, and in these every 



198 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

woman so gifted will excel ; for to excel in these 
is almost her peculiar province. 

In the minor and domestic departments of 
life, where woman's influence is so peculiarly 
blessed, the refinement of the Greek Nose will 
appear in those household arrangements which 
make home the happiest and most beloved spot 
on earth. It will exhibit itself in her needle- 
work by an artistic arrangement of colours and 
a poetic choice of subjects ; in a neat and elegant 
attire, in the decoration of her drawing-room, or 
in the paraphernalia of her boudoir. Nor need 
it be confined to those elegancies which seem to 
belong exclusively to the higher classes — a cup 
of flowers in a cottage window, the well-selected 
trimmings of a Sunday cap, or a pretty ornament 
on the mantel-shelf will equally be an evidence 
of a refined taste, and be found to accompany a 
Greek Nose. 

The Cogitative Nose does not so frequently 
appear among women as among men. Women 
rather feel than think. Their perceptions are 
intuitive, instinctive ; men's Cogitative. They 
are shrewder and more instantaneous in esti- 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 199 

mating character, or in deciding on action than 
men. Men must think, and fume, and fret before 
they can decide ; must, in common parlance, set 
the head (reason) against the heart (instinct) ; 
while women rely more on the latter, and are 
consequently, in judging of character or in de- 
ciding on a course of moral conduct, more fre- 
quently right than men. 

Our advice to a man would be this : if you 
are at a loss, after long cogitation, — as ten to 
one you will be — to know whether an intended 
act is morally right, ask a sensible woman, and 
she will guide you with perfect wisdom in a 
minute. So again: if you would know any 
one's moral character, let a sensible woman con- 
verse with him for five minutes and she will tell 
you without fail whether he may be trusted. 
Only be careful and accept her first dictum; 
don't argue the point with her, nor give her time 
to think ; have her instinctive decision. If she 
thinks, she will be ten times more at fault than 
a man ; and, if you argue the matter with her, 
she will lead you a dance through as fine a 
quagmire of absurdities as can be conceived, and 
there leave you, up to your neck in the slough, 



200 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

without the power — if not without the will — to 
help you out. And this needfully so. Instinct 
must ever be a better guide than Reason : 
for, 

" In this (Instinct) 'tis God that acts, in that (Reason) 
'tis man." 

" The perception of a woman," says Sherlock, 
" is as quick as lightning. Her penetration is 
intuition, almost instinct. By a glance she will 
draw a quick and just conclusion. Ask her how 
she formed it and she cannot answer the ques- 
tion. While she trusts her instinct she is 
scarcely ever deceived, but she is generally lost 
when she begins to reason." A more accurate 
picture of the female mind was never drawn ; yet 
some modern writers have fiercely controverted 
it. Under a mistaken notion of equalizing 
women with men, they seek to destroy the indi- 
vidualism of their character. One witty popular 
writer has even ventured to assert, that if half a 
dozen boys were brought up as girls, and half a 
dozen girls as boys, the latter would be to all 
intents psychologically men, and the former psy- 
chologically women. Surely a more preposterous 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 201 

absurdity never won the assent of the unthink- 
ing part of the community ; nevertheless, it has 
been warmly applauded and often repeated, as if 
it were an ascertained fact instead of a ridiculous 
fancy. 

The Jewish Nose is not very frequent among 
women. Neither are its indications material 
to the perfection of the female character. It is 
the duty of men to relieve women from the 
cares of commercial life, and to stand between 
them and those who would impose upon their 
credulity. Moreover, woman's natural pene- 
tration supplies the want of the thoughtful 
sagacity which protects men in intercommercial 
relations. 

The remarks which we made on the Snub 
Nose and the Celestial Nose in men require to 
be considerably modified when we treat of those 
classes in women. 

We confess a lurking penchant, a sort of 
sneaking affection which we cannot resist, for the 
latter of these in a woman It does not com- 
mand our admiration and respect like the Greek, 
to which we could bow down as to a goddess ; 

K 3 



202 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

but it makes sad work with our affections. The 
former too is not so unbearable as in a man. 
It is a great marrer of beauty undoubtedly ; but 
merely regarded as an index of weakness it 
claims our kindly consideration. Weakness in 
a man is detestable, in a woman excusable and 
rather loveable. It is a woman's place to be 
supported, not to support. Hence the classical 
emblem of the Vine and the Elm is felt to be 
beautiful and true, because it pourtrays accurately 
the natural mutual position of husband and wife. 
A woman, moreover, has generally tact sufficient 
to conceal (often to their entire annihilation) 
those unprepossessing characteristics of the Snub 
and the Celestial, which in a weak man become 
every day more and more strongly marked. A 
woman's weakness too is rather flattering, as it 
attests our supremacy ; a thing which we like to 
be constantly reminded of, and of which we are 
very jealous, as it stands on rather ticklish and 
much disputed ground. 

The impudence too, which is utterly unen- 
durable in a male Celestial, and which seems to 
court contact with the toe of one's boot, is in a 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 203 

woman ratherpiquant and interesting. ACelestial 
Nose in a woman is very frequently an index of 
wit. Wit is a talent not emanating from 
wisdom; quite the reverse. The wisest men 
are ofttimes the slowest. Wisdom comes after 
thought, wit before it. A Celestial-nosed 
woman is only more witty than a similarly gifted 
man, because the impudence which it invariably 
indicates is backed by woman's ever-ready tact 
and quickness. 

The indications are not varied ; but the ex- 
hibitions are. Even if a man were gifted with 
the power of uttering the severe witticisms, 
and cutting repartees which are nectar and 
ambrosia from the lips of a pretty woman, 
he dare not; for he would be inevitably 
kicked down stairs — if the fellow were worth 
the exertion. 

In a witty woman who can skirmish with 
unflinching quickness and dexterity, we can 
even forgive a slight moral delinquency. A 
little white-lie simpered out with arch assurance 
by a pair of demure lips, 

" Like leaves of crimson tulips met/' 



204 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

by no means offends us as it would in a man ; 
in whom we should attribute it to low cunning 
or mean cowardice. Indeed the exquisite look of 
arch impudence with which a delicately chiselled 
marbleine Celestial tells you a most palpable 
falsehood is maddening, perfectly beautiful, 
almost sublime. The cool assurance and 
sharp raillery with which she persists after 
detection ! the assumption of injured inno- 
cence ! the impudent look of defiance ! By 
Jove ! truly 

" The dear creatures lie with such a grace, 
There* s nothing so becoming to the face." 

And then when they are beaten from their 
last defence, and can resist no longer, when 
they are compelled to surrender and beg pardon, 
they do it as if they were forgiving you ; and 
make you feel almost as if you were being 
forgiven, as if you, not she, had all the while 
been erring: at all events you feel very like 
a fool, though very happy; and so a few tears, 
and a few (or not a few) kisses set all to 
rights, 



OF FEMININE NOSES. 205 

M And so we make it up ; 
And then — and then — and then — sit down and sup." 

All things considered therefore, and inasmuch 

as we prefer the naturalness of a witty woman 

to the artificialness of a learned woman, we 

confess to a liking for the Celestial Nose 

feminine, while we abhor the masculine. It is 

not, however, every female Celestial Nose that 

we admire (Heaven for our peace's sake forbid 

— they are so numerous). It must be of the 

purest and most delicate chiselling; have no 

tendency to cogitativeness, lest it should look 

as if its owner thought ; and its hue must be 

of the palest and most evanescent flesh-tint. 

These are essential to indicate that delicacy 

of mind which alone makes wit in a woman 

fascinating, and which pardons breaches of strict 

morality committed from the purest and most 

benevolent intentions. 

This sounds rather paradoxical, but an old 
Jacobite song will illustrate our meaning. The 
story goes that a gude-wife concealed a north 
country cousin, one of the adherents of Charlie, 
in the house unknown to the gude-man ; and 
her ingenuity is sorely puzzled to account for 



206 OF FEMININE NOSES. 

certain suspicious phenomena which strike him 
on his coming home : — 

" Hame came our gudeman at e'en, 
And hame came he, 
And there he saw a pair o' boots, 
Where nae the boots should be. 

e And how came these boots here, 

And whase can they be ? 
And how came thae boots here 
Without the leave of me ?' 

1 Boots !' quo' she ; (with amazement) 
' Aye, boots !' quo' he. 

' Ye auld blind dotard carle, 

And blinder mat ye be ! (indignantly) 
It's but a pair o' water-stoups, 
My minnie sent to me/ 

' Water-stoups ?' quo' he, 
c Aye, water-stoups;' quo' she." 

(with impudent determination). 

And so in like manner she unblushingly 
persists, in order to preserve her guest's life, 
that a saddle-horse is a milking cow, and a 
man's coat a pair of blankets. Now we are 
sure this dear woman had a Celestial Nose ; 
nothing else would have had the ready wit and 



OF FEMININE NOSES. .207 

the impudent assurance to attempt to befool 
her gudeman, and to persist, with the addition 
of no slight abuse of his dotard blindness, in 
her palpable falsehoods ; yet we defy any one 
not to love the good woman, and excuse her 
breaches of morality for the sake of her hos- 
pitable benevolence. 

We are conscious that in discussing female 
Noses, we are treading on delicate ground. 
It is a difficult and nervous subject. We have 
endeavoured, however, to say nothing but what 
appeared to us to be plain truth. Nevertheless 
we would apologize if we have given offence to 
any one, were it not that we forcibly feel the 
truth of the homely adage, " the least said the 
soonest mended," and therefore hasten to close 
a chapter which has given us more trouble and 
anxiety than all the rest together. 



CHAPTER IX. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 



The reader will probably have been led from 
the nomenclature, to inquire whether the asser- 
tion that certain forms of Xose are justly 
named after certain nations might not be 
extended further ? and whether every nation 
has not a characteristic Xose ? 

The reply to these questionings would be in 
the affirmative. Every nation Jias a charac- 
teristic Nose ; and the less advanced the nation 
is in civilization, the more general and per- 
ceptible is the characteristic form. While 
nations are in their infancy, and the mass of 
the people are uninformed, the features, re- 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 209 

ceiving no impressions from within, take the 
form impressed from without, and follow the 
national type. If one uniform state of things — 
of government, climate, and habits — continue, 
without education, generation may succeed 
generation and the original facial type of the 
race will remain. If, however, the national 
circumstances alter (still without general educa- 
tion) the national features follow the type im- 
pressed by those circumstances. We have 
appealed to many instances of these simul- 
taneous national changes when describing the 
different forms of Noses prevalent at different 
periods of English history. 

When however education becomes general, 
nations lose these national typical features ; for 
the physiognomy becomes so variously impressed 
from within, according to the different bias and 
affections of men's minds, that it ceases to 
receive those impressions from without, which 
generate national types. At present, however, 
there is so little generally diffused education 
that the typical features of most nations may 
yet be defined. 



210 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

These are not always the original types of the 
race. Numerous circumstances have among 
the more civilized nations contributed to pro- 
duce changes of greater or less magnitude. The 
various Caucasian nations, for instance, though 
all descended from one stock, have mostly lost 
their original type in their various migrations 
from the plains of Asia, and received such 
typical form as varying circumstances have 
since impressed. Hence the various Caucasian 
nations of Europe and Western Asia differ 
considerably from each in mental and bodily 
organization. 

These variations from the original type took 
place, however, at so early a period, even 
in the ante-historical period, that historians 
are apt to regard them as original and 
innate; and perhaps it is most convenient 
for them to do so. But this is not sufficient 
for the inquirer into the Races of Men. He 
goes back to ages far beyond the historical, 
or even the mythic, period ; and, finding 
these nations are descended from one family, 
perceives that the present variations must 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 2 1 i 

have taken place after the dispersion of the 
family into distant localities under leaders 
of very various temperament and views of 
social happiness. 

It would lead us too far to inquire whether 
the tendency of Nature to break up certain 
types into varieties, and form new races — 
perhaps even new species and genera — was 
not originally greater than it has been at 
any period within the knowledge of man. 
We see no changes take place now, such as 
long before even the mythic period, produced 
from one stock the wild urus, the domestic ox 
and the hunched bull of India. Neither do we 
see new races of men spring up ; such as in 
the very earliest times produced from one 
common ancestor the various diverse races of 
men ; white, black, yellow, and red. It is no 
poetical fancy that Nature's infancy was more 
active than its later years ; that " Nature wan- 
toned in her prime," and produced more 
gigantic effects than now. Not that the powers 
of Nature are weakened: but, the purpose 
having been accomplished, its workings are 
stayed by the fiat of the Almighty God, and 



212 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

are employed in sustaining and reproducing, 
instead of in generating anew and creating. 
When those powers are wanted again, they 
will spring into undecayed operation ; let a 
new continent rise from the deep and the new 
world have to be peopled, and Nature will 
again resume the gigantic forces of its infancy, 
and become young to fill with life and activity 
a young world. 

But at whatever period impressed, certain it 
is that many nations have a typical form of 
Nose, together with other peculiar distinctive 
features ; and it concerns us now rather to 
regard the fact as it exists than to inquire how 
it happened. 

The Roman, the Greek, and the Syrian 
forms of Nose have been alreadv descanted 
upon, as forming three bases of our nomencla- 
ture. The present European nations are the 
Gothic, the Celtic, the Sclavonic and the 
Finnish. 

The Gothic has been subjected to so many 
varying circumstances that it is now perhaps im- 
possible to assert, with confidence, its original 
natural form. Where a uniform dull system of 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 213 

despotism, political and religious, has for cen- 
turies bound down these nations in abject servi- 
tude, the Nose is sharp, devoid of Cogitativeness 
and Romano-Greek in profile. 

This is the case with the Spanish Goths and 
with those of France and Italy. These nations 
were so long held in mental thraldom that they 
ceased to cultivate cogitative powers which it 
was dangerous to use. Where espionage and 
Lettres de cachet, the Inquisition and Monach- 
ism dog and punish men's secret thoughts, and 
forbid the expression of any sentiment breathing 
a spirit opposed to the powers that be, or demon- 
strative of a disposition to inquire into the why 
and wherefore of political and religious dogmas, 
the mind, by an instinct of self-preservation, 
must cease to think. Where to think is a death- 
warrant, where a look of reflection or an aspect 
of discontent may be followed by the axe of the 
executioner, or the more fearful incarceration by 
the gaoler, the mind has no alternative but to 
forget itself and live in bestial oblivion, to " sit 
down to eat and drink and rise up to play." 
With the cessation of the Cogitative powers, the 
Cogitativeness of the features will disappear and 



214 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

the Nose will become defective in breadth, thin 
and sharp. To this want of reflection succeeds, 
in the naturally higher and more energetic 
nations, animal passion ; and, if ever the pressure 
is removed from the national mind and it obtain 
the upper hand of its keepers, fearful retribution 
and sanguinary revenge inevitably ensue. They 
who lived the animal life of a caged wild beast 
in apparent ease and quietude ; well fed and 
perhaps, sensually, better provided for than if 
left to their native freedom, will, when let loose 
from confinement, fearfully vindicate the natural 
law of liberty, and with an insane instinct tear in 
pieces the keepers who have fed them for their 
own purposes and nurtured them for their own 
pleasure and profit, reckless of the natural social 
rights of man. 

It is for this reason that the sharp, thin un- 
thinking Nose appears symbolic likewise of 
cruelty ; not so much because the natural dis- 
position is cruel, as because the mind, when 
unchained, acts from animal impulse and not 
from sage reflection; and animal revenge is 
always wild and cruel. 

We say this of nations which, like the Gothic 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 215 

and other Caucasian races, were originally well 
organized and endowed with higher capacities. 
This higher organization exhibits itself — what- 
ever the degrees of Cogitativeness which inci- 
dental circumstances may have added, or 
adeemed — in a profile, Roman, or Greek, or 
compounded of both, and which may therefore 
be called nationally Romano-Greek. The profile 
not being so subject to variation from the 
pressure of external circumstances as the breadth, 
remains still pretty uniformly the same in all the 
Caucasian races in Europe, which might be 
written ~. Other races there are which, either 
naturally of less penetrable stuff and a lower and 
more obtuse organization, or longer ground down 
beneath a more crushing and uniform despotism, 
remain contented slaves and willing bondmen. 
This degradation, as we shall see when we 
come to speak of the Asiatic nations, appears 
also in their Noses. 

France, Spain, and Italy have been depressed 
not only beneath a political despotism till within 
a very recent period, but under the still more 
soul-crushing despotism of a gross superstition 



216 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

and corrupt religion — the latter even more than 
the former has repressed Cogitativeness in those 
nations. If there is one subject which more 
than another interests the human mind and 
occupies the thoughts it is its religion — its 
eternal prospects — for Man is essentially a re- 
ligious animal. Debarred from exercising thought 
upon its most natural and interesting topics — 
and all other subjects being dragged within the 
jealous circle of a religious despotism — so stern 
a barrier is opposed to thought that the mind 
rarely dare overleap it. While a political des- 
potism may be well-pleased to see its subjects 
occupied in scientific or metaphysical researches, 
in order to wean them from too critical an ex- 
amination of itself, a religious despotism forbids 
any such researches unless made within the small 
circle it has prescribed. Death or imprisonment 
awaits a Galileo or a Copernicus, as it would 
under a similar rule, even now, await a Buckland 
or a Lyell. 

At present, we lament that we can see no- 
thing in the recent revolutionary movements in 
France and Italy, to indicate the existence of 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 217 

those Cogitative powers, the want of which has 
always hitherto checked their advancement 
towards true liberty and self-government. 

Now, as in 1793, there seems " equally a 
want of books and men ;" without which, after 
a few years of bloodshed and anarchy, those 
countries must again submit to a despotic form 
of government. No country can be governed 
without intellect ; and if that is not to be found 
in the many, the few who possess it must be- 
come the ruler. 

This country has never long needed such 
a despotism. Germany too, though hardly 
yet freed from a political despotism, has 
through a large portion of its area long thrown 
off the despotism of Rome and embraced the 
more elevating and life-giving doctrines of the 
Reformation. In those provinces where this 
blessed change has taken place, Germany is 
starting rapidly into that career of intellectuality 
which England commenced three hundred years 
ago. The Germans and the English are pre- 
eminently deep-thinking nations ; and in both 
of them is the Nose more decidedly and more 



218 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

generally of a Cogitative form than in any other 
Gothic nations. 

The Cogitative may, therefore, perhaps, be 
said to be one of the characteristic forms of the 
Noses of those Gothic branches, and might be 
expressed thus, I - J ~* Nevertheless, various 
degrees of education and various pursuits, with 
(in England) free institutions, have so diversified 
their features that they exhibit a much less 
uniform character than the features of most 
other nations. 

The Anglo-Americans afford a further cor- 
roborative proof that the Cogitative Nose is 
dependent on the cultivation of a Cogitative 
mind. They present a striking contrast to 
their puritan forefathers, — men who abandoned 
home, country and friends, for the sake of 
religious and political opinions ; men to whom 
conscience was dearer than life, and freedom 
more precious than worldly advantage ; men of 
the strictest integrity, the most scrupulous 
honesty, and the sternest firmness, sullied only 
by an excess of over-wrought feeling — fanati- 
cism. All these virtues, and this vice (itself a 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 219 

virtue gone mad), are wanting to the American 
character. That there are happy exceptions, it 
is true ; but a nation which boasts smartness 
as its most prominent virtue, must not complain 
if it is accused of want of principle. The 
circumstances of young America have contri- 
buted to render tier's an unthinking people. 
The wild life to which so large a portion have 
been subjected, cut off from all neighbourhood, 
debarred from communication with cultivated 
minds, thrown entirely on the active business of 
the day for mental food, they have necessarily 
degenerated from the thinking men to whom 
they are indebted for their origin. 

So far from the American Nose inheriting 
the Cogitative form of their ancestors', it is 
thin and sharp ; and, as a national nose, the 
most unthinking of any of the Gothic stock. 
America is, however, a fast-growing nation; it 
has had no infancy, but started at once into 
life, a full-grown youth. There is hope, there- 
fore — of which already some assurance has 
been given — that it will yet furnish its 
quota of thinkers to the history of the human 
mind. 

L 2 



220 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

The Celtic races call for less extended obser- 
vation. As an un-Gothicized nation, the Irish 
is the only remnant of a people which probably 
was at one time thinly spread over the whole 
of Europe. Nearly related to, if not originally 
identical with, the Goths, yet naturally of a less 
vigorous constitution, and lower habit of mind, 
the Celts rapidly gave way before, or irretriev- 
ably amalgamated themselves with, their 
Pelasgian invaders in Greece and Italy, and their 
Gothic invaders in Trans-Alpine Europe. 

Thus, at one time losing themselves in the 
overwhelming flood of their invaders, like the 
waters of a lake inundated by the sea; at 
another, retreating westerly before the on-coming 
torrent, the Celtic nations have gradually 
almost disappeared from continental Europe, 
and alone find a miserable home and wretched 
abiding place on the most eastern shores of the 
Atlantic, and the most western corners of the 
Old World. 

If the Atlantic could have afforded them 
a footing upon its turbulent waters, they would 
long since have been driven into it by their 
rapacious invaders. The complaint of the 



OF NATIONAL NOSES, 221 

unhappy Celts has ever since they were hunted 
to the extreme west of Europe, been the same, 
" Our enemies drive us into the sea ; and the 
sea drives us back upon our enemies." 

Saxon ingenuity has, however, at last endea- 
voured to circumvent the sea. If it cannot 
receive into its bosom the last wreck of the 
Celts, it can carry them upon it to lands still 
further west, there to pine, and dwindle away 
and die ; out of sight, and therefore out of the 
mind, of the haughty invader, who turns with 
well-feigned horror and disgust from the ruin 
and degradation which he has wrought. 

To make room for himself, he expatriates the 
ancient owners of the soil, not only without 
remorse or compunction, but with much self- 
laudation and pharisaical pride, that he has not 
extirpated them, and has not — only because he 
could not — adopted the ingenious idea of 
temporarily sinking an island to purify it for his 
own undisputed use and enjoyment.* 

* " In 1846, which was a year of larger emigration 
than any that preceded, it amounted to 129,851. But 
in the first three quarters of the last year (1847), the 



222 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

Naturally, however, the Celtic is not a low- 
class race. It may not have been originally so 



emigration extended to no less than 240,732 persons, 
almost the whole of them being Irish emigrants to 
North America. It is scarcely necessary to observe, 
that history records no single transportation at all to 
compare with this. The migrations of classical anti- 
quity were only the slow oozings of infant tribes from 
one thinly- peopled district into another rather less 
peopled, or rather more fertile. In actual figures, the 
irruptions from the north into southern Europe were 
never atone time more immense." 

The Government only refrained from assisting this 
tremendous emigration at the urgent demand of the 
land-owners, because it was going on as fast as possible 
without its aid. Bad legislation had driven the Celt to 
the ocean, and Saxon ingenuity had furnished him a 
boat to cross it. Famine and pestilence were at his 
heels. It was unnecessary to do more. What drowning 
wretch will not catch at a straw ? What patient ideot 
not fly from misery and death ? ^et how monstrous to 
call such flight — M the headlong terror of a panic-stricken 
army'' — spontaneous ! 

" It was the unavoidable misfortune of this emigration 
to be entirely spontaneous. The cry was — ■ Sauve qui 
peut f To send out more emigrants at the public 
expense, or to promise assistance to all who should 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 223 

highly organized, or so mentally gifted as the 
Gothic : but in its infancy it had virtues which 
long thraldom has exterminated. 



emigrate, would only have been adding fuel to the fire, 
or like attempting to expedite the movement of a crowd 
locked in a narrow passage, by applying fresh numbers 
and pressure to its rear. A miserable necessity dictated 
that as a general rule, emigration should be allowed to 
retain its spontaneous, unassisted character. * * * The 
fever, it is a painful satisfaction to reflect, raged with equal 
force in all the British vessels, whether well or ill- 
provisioned and appointed. Fearful, too, as the loss of 
life was, both at sea and on landing, it was not greater 
than was reasonably to be expected from the mortality 
which prevailed, under circumstances rather less unfa- 
vourable for health, in the workhouses and other accu- 
mulations of Irish at home. ,, — Times, Jan. 1848. 

History, in its blackest pages records nothing more 
horrible than the miseries of the passage ; yet while we 
are maudlin over the horrors of the slave-trade, we 
' reflect, with a painful satisfaction/ on the more dreadful 
sufferings of our fellow-citizens. The slave-dealer cal- 
culates to land at their destination four-fifths of his 
cargo; and it is thought sufficiently shocking that 
1 in 5 die on the passage. But the mortality on board 
the Irish emigrant ships was greater. Many vessels, 
from their rotten state, perished altogether, with from 



224 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

It is no fiction that Caesar found the Gaulish 
and British youth more apt than the Goths, at 
acquiring the arts and language of Rome, and 
that, in a few years, Roman civilization, more 
efficient than Saxon, had converted Britain into 
one of the most fertile and well-ordered 
provinces of the empire. It is no fiction that 



200 to 300 passengers. This rarely happens with a 
slaver as the vessels are necessarily of the very best 
construction. But, of those who escaped shipwreck, 
1 in 3, and 1 in 4 died on the passage from fever, and 
one half the remainder suffered from disease. The 
' Laren* from Sligo sailed with 440 passengers — 108 
died and 150 were sick. The ' Virginius' sailed with 
496 passengers — 158 died, 186 were sick, and the 
remainder landed feeble and tottering. It could hardly 
be otherwise, when vessels built to pack 200 emigrants 
sailed with twice that number : so that they are des- 
cribed to be worse than the black-hole of Calcutta. 
And this was the emigration which the British parlia- 
ment — which laboured to put down the slave-trade — 
declared itself willing to encourage, had it been neces- 
sary from any backwardness in the wretched Celts, to 
avail themselves of it, and which a British Minister 
coolly declared it would have been inhuman and unjust 
to interfere with. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 225 

Rome found in Britain one of the most deter- 
mined opposers of its claim to universal 
dominion and that if it were to be 

" Asked, why from Britain Caesar did retreat ? 
Caesar himself might whisper — he was beat." 

It is no fiction that after British Christianity 
had been driven by Saxon Paganism from 
Britain into Ireland, the Irish Celts furnished 
the best schools for literature, and the ablest 
scholars in Europe — and it is no fiction that 
ever since the Saxon has set foot in Ireland it 
has continued to droop and decay, until it is 
now a foul bog of iniquity ; a wretched irre- 
claimable sink of inhuman vice and monstrous 
infamy. 

This is but the caged wild beast gnawing at 
its chain, and snapping at its keeper, whether 
his hand approaches to feed or to heal it. Its 
Cogitativeness has been repressed till it cannot 
reflect nor appreciate any but physical modes of 
escape from thraldom. 

It may be said, escape lies open to it in self- 
elevation, in moral rectitude, and industrious 
exertion ; but it is too late for it to see and 

L 3 



226 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

understand that. We might as well say to the 
broken leg, walk now, you walked once ; or to 
the encaged madman, calm yourself and be free, 
you were calm and free once. 

We need no better proof of the non-cogita- 
tiveness of Ireland than the facile manner in 
which it throws itself beneath the Jugernautic 
car of every demagogue, and sacrifices itself to 
his avaricious cruelty. We need no better proof 
of the truth of our theory, than that the Nose 
of the same nation is deficient in Cogitative- 
ness, and is, for the most part thin and sharp. 
It has, not, however, lost the Romano-Greek 
profile, usual among the Caucasian races. 

The lowest organized race of any consequence 
in Europe, is the Sclavonic. 

The Sclavones came into contact with 
Roman civilization earlier than the Goths; 
but, unlike the latter, they retired to their 
settlements without carrying away any portion 
of the manners and habits of the people 
whom they invaded. Even yet they are but 
little advanced, since that early epoch. At 
least till within the present century, the Russian 
noble, as well as his serf, led the life of a pig, 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 227 

eating and drinking and sleeping. Wallowing 
in filth, insensate with brandy, and degraded by 
lust, the Russians of various ranks, differ only 
in the size and splendour of their respective 
styes. To enter with minuteness into the daily 
habits of all classes of both sexes would be to 
present a picture which we should revolt from 
drawing, and the reader from beholding. 

The Snubby-Celestial form of the Sclavonic 
Nose, stamps its character irretrievably, and 
accords remarkably with the description of the 
Sclavonic mind given by Kohl and other recent 
writers : — " Inconsistent and unstable — wanting 
in the creative faculty; but we cannot deny them 
a marvellous aptitude for all kinds of work, and 
an extreme facility of imitation,"* This is just 
the description a farmer might give of his 
horse, or a fine lady of her monkey. " The 
hope of Europe," says the same author, " from 
Russian power consists in its total want of 
vigorous characters, mighty minds, and moral 
energy." The pictures, which the lively writer 
Kohl gives of the Russians — their c small 

* Schnitzler's Russia under Alexander and Nicholas. 



228 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

shrewdness and fox-like common sense 5 , their 
impudent acknowledgment of their shameless 
cheating and pedlaring dishonesty — accord lite- 
rally with the indications which we have ascribed 
to the Celestial Nose ; but we must refer the 
reader to his work on Russia for endless con- 
firmations of our assertion. 

Russia may rise above its present animal 
degradation, but it will never take a high place 
in the history of civilization. It may be 
doubted whether it will ever take any station 
there at all, except when in some future 
and long distant age, it is recorded, that, like 
Asia and Africa, Europe fell from its palmy 
state, and became a heap of ruins before the 
furious desolation of barbarous swarms from 
the north. 

Napoleon said, with the prophetic vision of 
old experience, for 

" Old experience doth attain 
To somewhat of prophetic strain," 

that in fifty years Europe would be Republican 
or Cossack. He only erred in using the dis- 
junctive ; for it does not require much pene- 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 229 

tration to foresee that, at no very distant period, 
Europe will be both — first Republican, and then, 
when thus prostrated at the foot of the first 
powerful despot— Cossack. 

For this purpose, it is probable the Sclavonian 
nations, with hordes of Mongolian Calmucks, 
and Tartars — the <npo\, or flat-nosed nations, of 
Herodotus — are gathering force and increasing 
in their vast plains and desolate forests. The 
scourge of Europe is being prepared ; slowly 
but surely ; and when civilization shall have taken 
a firm hold of America and the new continents 
gradually being built up in the Pacific, Europe, 
having fulfilled its part in the world's history, 
will be swept away, and become a byword and a 
scorn among the nations — Ichabod will be 
written on its temples, and the bittern and the 
owl shall inhabit it ; the wild beast of the 
desert shall lie there, and the dragons in its 
pleasant palaces. 

The Finnish race presents a remarkable proof 
of the variation in physiognomy attendant on 
variation in mental capacity, occasioned by 
change of circumstances — as government, cli- 
mate and habits. The ancient Huns, the 



230 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

modern Hungarians, and the northern Finns 
and Lapps of the shores of the Bothnian Gulf 
and the White Sea, are all of the same race ; 
and yet differ widely from each other in phy- 
siognomy and psychonomy. 

The differences between those races took 
place within the historic period, and afford a 
striking instance of the effect of external cir- 
cumstances in modifying the mental and cor- 
poreal features. 

The fierce and savage Huns, who overrun a 
portion of the Roman Empire under Attila in 
the fifth century, differed wholly from the Finns 
now existing in Europe. So misshapen were 
their features, and so hideous their aspect, so 
savage and demoniacal their warfare, that the 
terrified Goths could not believe them to be 
born of woman, but asserted them to be the 
unnatural offspring of demons and witches in 
the fearful solitudes of the icy north. One of 
their distinctive features was a flat depressed 
Nose, plainly indicating their low organization. 

Although the Finns and Lapps retain the 
flat-nose — never having emerged from bar- 
barism — they are a mild, gentle, meek-spirited 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 231 

race, presenting few features which seem capable 
of amelioration. 

The Hungarians, on the other hand — in 
whom, however, we must suspect a large in- 
fusion of Gothic blood — are a bold, independent, 
noble-minded, and highly intellectual people; 
characteristics which exhibit themselves in a 
noble Roman Nose, and a countenance bespeak- 
ing the independence of their minds. 

We may next advert to the characteristic 
features of a few of the Asiatic nations. 

Perhaps no nation displays a more universal 
dead level and general sameness of feature than 
the Snub-nosed Chinese. Notwithstanding the 
great varieties in climate and soil which pre- 
vail in that extensive Empire, and the corres- 
pondent variations which must be made in 
domestic habits and style of living, a remarkable 
identity of feature prevails among all classes of 
every province. The faces may be said to be 
all cast in the same mould, and one could wish 
that Nature, when she made the first cast, 
had — as she is reported to have done when she 
made a certain beautiful female, whose name 
we forget — broken the mould before she pro- 



232 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

duced any more casts from it. Perhaps, how- 
ever, we belie the good old dame in attributing 
the production of this, or any other equally ugly 
countenance to her. It is rather the degraded 
form into which a despotism of unknown 
duration and unexampled soul-depressive powers 
has converted the original type. 

A form of government more admirably 
arranged to keep the people in a state of child- 
hood has never been modelled than that of 
China. The wisdom of its arrangements for 
securing the permanent despotism of the ruler 
is undeniably proved by its long and peaceable 
subsistence. To rebel in China is the heinous 
crime of filial disobedience ; it is not, as in 
Europe, a political crime merely, it is also a 
moral crime of the same class as murder or 
theft. Unless we can imagine a nation bv 
universal assent throwing off the bonds of 
morality, and living in confessedly gross crime, 
we can form no conception of Chinese rebelling. 
It would present the unnatural and incon- 
ceivable state of a nation of parricides and 
disobedient children. 

Every superior in China, from the Emperor 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 233 

to the military officer or civil Mandarin, is " a 
father ;" all under him are his " children/' and 
as such must obey him without question or 
demur. " Filial disobedience/' whether to parents 
or governors is the highest crime. Filial diso- 
bedience is thus defined :— " In our general 
conduct not to be orderly, is to fail in filial 
duty : in a Magistrate not to be faithful, is to 
fail in filial duty: among friends, not to be 
sincere, is to fail in filial duty: in arms and 
war, not to be brave, is to fail in filial duty." 
A people thus treated as children, must ever 
remain in a state of childhood; and though 
education is general among the Chinese, it is 
an education which, like the bandages on their 
women's feet, binds their minds from growing, 
and restricts them to the size and calibre of 
infancy. 

Education in China consists solely in social 
and political training for the purposes of des- 
potism. The studies are confined to one un- 
varied routine, and no deviation from the 
prescribed track is permitted. Within this 
circle all are, and must be, educated. Hence an 
uniformity of mind prevails, and has prevailed 



234 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

for ages throughout China, and has extended 
itself to the national features; betraying itself 
in Snub Noses and a dull, stolid expression of 
countenance. So much for compulsory educa- 
tion ! It is impossible that it should be other- 
wise. A nation whose minds are all reduced 
to the same level; whose thoughts are pre- 
scribed ; whose daily conduct is measured out ; 
whose very amusements are dictated by an 
imperial will, must necessarily soon become 
uniform, both mentally and physically. 

This uniformity will be the waveless level of 
the Dead Sea. Storms may agitate the upper 
sky, winds may rage, and floods descend ; but 
the waves are too heavy to rise from their 
death-like repose. They sleep the calm sleep, 
not of peace, but of death. The last trumpet 
alone can arouse their torpor. The benignant 
mind of the Christian may nourish sweet hopes 
of evangelizing a nation so sunk, but the hopes 
are vain. Christianity came not till the human 
mind was fitted and prepared to receive and 
understand its divine precepts. It came not to 
the infancy of the world, but to its old age 
and matured judgment. A nation, therefore, 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 235 

steeped in the irreclaimable dotage of a 
childhood which has endured throughout its 
whole life, cannot receive it. Both the Hindoos 
and the Chinese- have forfeited by their long- 
lived puerility the blessed message. 

The first and every subsequent step of 
Christianity, as of civilization, has been West- 
ward. Neither can ever return to the East. 
The Apostle of the Gentiles preached from 
Judea to Pamphylia and Galatia, but was for- 
bidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word 
in Asia ; # and when he assayed to go Eastward 
into Bithynia, the spirit suffered him not, but 
compelled him westerly into Macedonia. From 
Macedonia to Rome ; from Rome to Gaul ; 
from Gaul to Britain ; from Britain to America 
and Polynesia, the course has still ever been 
uniformly westward.! A few isolated Chris- 
tians may be made in Asia ; but it will never 
be christianized. Asia has performed its part 
on the world's stage. It is dead out, and can- 



*. Acts, xvi. 

t That is, westerly from the country last civilized or 
christianized. 



236 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

not be resuscitated. When Christianity is enter* 
tained by " all nations," Asia will be no more. 
It will not be reckonable among the nations, 
even as a dead man is not among the living. 
This may seem a harsh judgment. But is it 
harsher that nations whose own degradation 
unfits them for Christianity, shall remain igno- 
rant of it during the brief remainder of the 
world, than that they have been ignorant of it 
for nearly two thousand years ? 

It is not for man to judge God, and to say 
that His ways are unjust. We must not deny 
the fact because we cannot comprehend it. We 
cannot tell by what crimes Asia has forfeited her 
part in the New Covenant of Grace. It may 
be because she rejected the first dispensation and 
flagrantly violated the Old Covenant of Works. 
To Asia, the mother of mankind, the blissful 
seat of our first parents, the nurse of the re- 
novated human race, were given the first pure, 
simple precepts by which Man was taught to 
obey his God as a child obeys his parent. How 
soon she flung off this obedience and rejected 
her Great Teacher let history, both sacred and 
profane, attest. Long ere Asia sent forth 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 237 

peoples and nations to replenish other quarters 
of the earth, these original precepts had been ob- 
scured and obliterated by idolatry and polytheism. 
A lesser crime, therefore, attached to these mis- 
instructed offsprings than to the misteaching 
mother. A second dispensation was therefore 
revealed to them, but forbidden to her. So far 
man might think he comprehended the divine 
purposes without impugning God's wisdom and 
justice ; yet may he err, and his frail musings be 
but the cogitations of the flea which reasons on 
the movements of the elephant, whose back is 
his universe. This should be the humble reflec- 
tion of all who strive to justify the ways of God 
to man. We know but in part, and we see but 
in part, and therefore cannot judge of Him who 
sees and knows the whole. 

We have incidentally mentioned the Hindoos 
as partaking in the mental degradation of the 
Chinese. But, nevertheless, they are not nearly 
so degraded a race, nor have they so general an 
uniformity in their features, nor so low a forma- 
tion of their Noses. India has been subjected 
to less uniformity of despotism than China. 



238 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

While to the dominant system of the latter we 
can assign no limit, we find in that of the 
former numerous epochs when important changes 
have taken place. 

Fierce religious wars, frequent foreign inva- 
sions, domestic feuds and intestine warfare have 
kept the Hindoo mind more on the alert than 
that of China. Assyria, Egypt, Scythia, Greece, 
Persia and Britain have at different epochs over- 
whelmed India. Idolatrous Monotheism, Poly- 
theism, Mahometanism and Christianity have, 
in turn, violated its shrines and endeavoured to 
overwhelm both Buddha and Brahma. Buddha 
and Brahma, Vishnu and Siva have striven to 
overthrow each other; but while the country 
has been desolated, the people have been saved 
from sinking into the uniform degradation of 
the Chinese. Nevertheless, under each and 
every system, despotism has prevailed in India ; 
no free institution has ever flourished on its 
plains ; and, therefore, despite the stirring events 
which have excited it, it has never risen again to 
that high station which its people must have 
held among their cotemporaries when they 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 239 

sculptured the caves of Elephanta and Ellora, 
and raised the pyramidal pagodas of Tanjore 
and Deogur. 

These gigantic works sufficiently attest that 
the inhabitants of India are not naturally of a 
low-class race. Forty thousand men labouring 
incessantly for forty years would hardly suffice 
to excavate and sculpture the cavern-temples of 
Salsette alone. Yet those form but a small 
portion of similar gigantic works of the same 
age. 

No mean-minded men raised fanes such as 
these to the Deity. Energy of the most vigorous 
character, talent of the highest rank, and devotion 
of the noblest nature could alone have dictated 
and executed structures which outvie in mag- 
nitude the boldest efforts of modern genius. In 
comparing them with the latter, we should 
moreover recollect that they were the first efforts 
of the human race; made without pattern, 
designed without exemplar, and commenced and 
carried out without experience. 

How different must those men have been 
from the soft and effeminate Hindoo who has 
forgotten in the mist of ages these shrines of his 



240 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

fathers, and abandoned them to ruin and decay ; 
and who, conscious of his own utter inability to 
achieve or conceive their equals, ascribes their 
formation to giants and demigods. And they 
were different. The same race, but different 
men, different in features as in minds. While 
the profile of the modern Hindoo is soft and 
effeminate, and the Nose short and rounded, 
(Parabolic) the ancient sculptures demonstrate 
that the profile of their earliest progenitors was 
manly and decided, and identical with that of 
their descendants, the Indo-Germanic nations, in 
Europe. One well-known instance will suffice. 
The Trimurti or three-headed deity in the caves 
of Elephanta. 




THE HINDOO TRIMURTI. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 241 

This is a sculpture of the most remote antiquity, 
but the dress, the beads, the sacred cord and 
other religious symbols declare it to be the work 
of Hindoos. In anthropomorphising the Deity, 
men always adopt their own typical countenance 
for that of their God. Hence their idols betray 
the National features. Now, observe the pro- 
files of Vishnu and Siva in this Trimurti. The 
face of the former, the good and beneficent 
" Preserver/' the friend and mediator for Man 
is a purely Greek face ; the Nose straight and 
w T ell-defined. It has none of the air of the mo- 
dern Hindoo countenance. Much less has that of 
the energetic and terrible Siva, " the Destroyer." 
The Nose is of the most energetic form ; it is 
a fine Roman Nose, aquiline and rugose. 
If phrenologists are permitted from similar facts 
to say that the Greeks — who were but children 
to these Hindoo artists — were phrenologists, 
surely we may venture to say that even at this 
very early period the Hindoos were Naso- 
logists. 

But in the wide nostril of Brahma we also 
perceive the Cogitative form of Nose, so 

M 



242 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

necessary to indicate the wisdom of Brahma, 
" the Creator :" who, though he now rests, 
having consigned the inferior office of Preserva- 
tion to Vishnu, was the first emanation from 
the supreme Brahma, and by whom and from 
whom all creation proceeded. With the ex- 
ception of the head in this Trimurti, Brahma 
has no idolatrous representations, for it is said 
in the Vedas, " Of Him whose glory is so great, 
there is no image. He is the incomprehensible 
Being w 7 hich illumines all, delights all, and 
whence all proceed." 

Sir William Jones mentions in one of his 
discourses published in the Asiatic Researches, 
the existence of a small nation in India which 
appears distinct from the Hindoo race. The 
people comprising it he describes as shrewd, 
clever tradesmen, enterprising merchants, acute 
money-lenders, and notorious in India for their 
aptitude for commerce. Their countenances, 
he adds, are what are called Jewish, and hence 
he concludes that they constitute a portion of Jews, 
who either at the dispersion of the Ten Tribes, 
or at some other very early period settled in 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 243 

India. It is surprising that the acute Presi- 
dent should have so hastily jumped to such 
a conclusion from the foregoing premises; for 
he adds a fact which seems most decidedly 
to negative it. This people, he tells us, have 
not the slightest trace of any Jewish traditions, 
belief, or customs among them. Now it is a 
familiar fact that the Jews, wherever dispersed, 
or however long separated from their brethren, 
have invariably retained a very large proportion 
of the inspired precepts revealed to regulate 
their religious, moral, and social conduct ; and 
it must demand the most precise and indis- 
putable evidence to justify the classing any 
people as Jews, who have lost all traces of 
the manners and customs of that singular 
nation. 

For these reasons we do not hesitate to say 
that the two facts on which Sir W. Jones 
founded his hasty hypothesis, viz., the com- 
mercial character and the Jewish physiognomy 
of this Asiatic tribe, afford by their coincidence 
only a remarkable and curious confirmation of 
our Nasological theory, and as such, we here 
gladly insert it. 

m 2 



244 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

We have said that the Jewish Nose should 
more properly be called the Syrian nose ; but 
have reserved until this place, some of the cor- 
roborative illustrations. 

The Syrian Arabs, as descendants of Abra- 
ham, through the wild son of Hagar, inherit the 
physical, and many of the metaphysical, features 
of the Hebrew nation. 

Destined by the promise of God to 
become a great nation, the Arabs founded 
one of the most extensive kingdoms of the 
earth, and for many centuries swayed an 
empire more extensive than that of Rome in 
her fullest prosperity. For twelve hundred 
years, a larger proportion of the inhabitants 
of the earth have devoutly obeyed the pre- 
cepts of the Arabian prophet, than have 
knelt at the altar of any other individual creed ; 
and, though Mahometanism is perhaps doomed 
to fall before Christianity, it cannot be re- 
garded in any other light than as a minor 
dispensation, and an inferior blessing conferred 
by Providence on a very large portion of 
His people. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 245 

Christians, who yet recognize the finger of 
God in every sublunary affair, would shrink with 
horror, if asked to recognize in Mahometanism a 
Providential dispensation ; yet, whether we re- 
gard it as a religion which annihilated the 
grossest idolatries, abolished human sacrifices, 
exterminated the vilest obscenities, and substi- 
tuted a nearly spiritual worship of One God, over 
the largest and fairest portion of the earth, — or 
as the religion of a nation, whose ancestor God 
blessed, and promised to " make a great nation," 
and " to multiply exceedingly, that it should not 
be numbered for multitude;" and who, in token 
thereof, received the seal of circumcision — to this 
day retained as among the Jews — it is difficult 
not to see in it the finger of God, or to 
deny that the pseudo-prophet of the sons of 
Ishmael was an unconscious instrument in His 
hands. 

But this is a topic not needful for us 
here to enter fully upon. It is more to our 
purpose to remark upon the psychonomic 
features of the Arabs, while in the zenith of 
their glory as a nation; when the Caliphs 



246 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

of the East ruled as Priest and Potentate, 
over more than two-thirds of the known 
globe. 

During this glorious period of their power, 
the Arab character shone out uncontrolled in its 
true features, and exhibited itself as it had never 
done before, nor since. 

True to its parentage, but unshackled by 
the stringent laws, and anti-social ceremo- 
nies of its more favoured brother, it rioted 
in all those tastes and pursuits which the 
latter delighted in, but was restrained from ; 
and became celebrated for a splendour, which 
was rivalled by that of Solomon alone, and 
a traffic which for outvied that of all 
contemporaries, or predecessors — except, 
perhaps, the cognate nation, the Phoeni- 
cians. 

Rich in barbaric pearls and gold, and boasting 
all the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind, the Court 
of the Caliphs verified the visions of the 
"Arabian Nights;" which, if true, were true 
here only. All the gauds and trinkets, the 
golden palaces, the jewelled walls, the glittering 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 247 



r 




roofs, in which the other branch* of the Hebrew 
nation displayed their highest ideas of magni- 
ficence, shone resplendent in the Halls of the r 
Caliphs. 

But as to the boasted literature of the Arabs, 
it resolves itself into an ardent pursuit of physi- 
cal science — astronomy, chemistry, and the * 
mechanical arts, for nearly all the more im- ^ 
portant of which we are indebted to the Arabs ; 
not, however, as inventors, but as carriers, like 
the Phoenicians. In the higher departments of, 
literature, the Arabs made no progress. Meta- 
physical disquisitions, and intellectual pursuits 
were repugnant to their tastes, which rather de- 
lighted in the physics of Aristotle than the 
metaphysics of Plato. 

Nor were they less true to their nasal de- 
velopment in their success and skill in com- 



* The Hebrews consider themselves to be so named 
from Heber, an ancestor of Abraham (Gen. xi. 15). The 
descendants of Ishmael are therefore equally entitled to 
the name. * m J^ 




248 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 



mercial pursuits. The commerce of Arabia, 
for several centuries, encircled the whole known 
world. From the frigid shores of Scandinavia, 
from the torrid sands of Africa, from silken 
Cathay, from jewelled Ceylon, from vine-clad 
Europe, from spicy Araby, flowed the rich 
streams of produce. The amber of the north 
was exchanged for the gold of the south ; the 
wines of Spain for the silks of China; the 
pearls of Ceylon for the slaves and gold dust 
of Africa ; and a commerce now excelled 
only by that of England, carried arts and 
literature from one end of the Old World 
to the other, and was mainly instrumental 
in raising the more highly organized na- 
tions of Europe from barbarism to a 
physical and intellectual splendour hitherto 
unknown. 

But from this glorious reality, the Arab has 
sunk into a wretched, irretrievable lethargy. 
Like the Jew, he has been weighed in the 
balance and found wanting ; the cup of promise 
has been held to his lips, and he has refused, 
or polluted the blessed draught. They have 



*r 



*• 



JV£ \^1*^U***>' 



fa* 






(nitfLPierz^* 



•^ 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 249 

been called, but would not come, they would 
have been gathered together as tender chickens 
under the wings of the hen, but they would not; 
and " behold their house is left unto them 
desolate/' 

Neither Arab nor Jew shall ever again revive, 
till they join with the whole earth in one 
universal cry, " Blessed is He that cometh in 
the name of the Lord !" 

It has been said that Christian intolerance 
has driven the Jew into the mart, and sunk his 
soul in barter. But this is not true — Com- 
merce and money-getting are the psychonomic 
features of both the Hebrew races. The 
Israelitish branch is vehemently charged with 
its usury and extortion, by all its prophets. 
The severe laws which Moses made against \y^L 
usury shew the character of the people for % 
whom they were necessary ; yet those laws were 
ineffectual to check this inherent vice. Ezekiel " 
(cap. xxii. 1 2) exclaims, " Thou hast taken #kP^ * 
usury and increase, and thou hast greedily ; 
gained of thy neighbours by extortion, and hast C [ 
forgotten me, saith the Lord God ;" so all the 
prophets. 



h 




250 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

The Arab and the Jew are both now equally 
sunk in the same degradation, (Heu ! quantum 
mutati /) and both exhibit, through this degra- 
dation, their love of gold, though in a different 
manner. The Arab still haunting his native 
soil, from which legitimate commerce is almost 
excluded, betrays his ruling passion in extortion 
from travellers, in skilful chicanery in horse 
dealing — the only commerce left to him — or in 
impudent incessant demands on strangers for 
bacsheesh. 

All travellers agree, that when the Arab, 
degraded as he is, has an opportunity, there 
is no shrewder or more skilful bargain maker, 
nor any one more competent to extract by 
ingenious chaffering, the full equivalent for 
his services. He has been designated by 
fleeced and angry travellers — little thinking 
how near the mark they were — the Jew of 
the desert. The Jew, driven from the land 
of his birth into a wider sphere, turns his 
commercial propensities to better account, 
and under every clime, and amidst every 
race, out-manoeuvres and surpasses his less 
shrewd antagonist. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 251 

Other Asiatic nations might seem to call 
for observation ; but so little is known of their 
mental characteristics, that it would be improper 
to endeavour to substantiate our cause by 
them. 

It is unnecessary to do more than remind 
the reader of the low development of the Negro 
mind and his miserable nasal conformation — 
they are worthy of each other. However 
humane may be the attempts to elevate the 
Negro, it never can be done till his Nose is more 
elongated ; but as its present form has subsisted 
without alteration for three or four thousand 
• years, there does not seem much hope of its being 
improved now. The Negro race, as old as the 
earliest Egyptian sculptures, has never risen 
to an equality with any of the other races; 
and, though we would not willingly condemn 
any nation to hopeless degradation, yet the 
history of the Past will reveal somewhat of 
the secrets of the Future, and he is a fool 
who cannot, and a coward who dare not, read 
them. 

As among individuals so among nations, 



252 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 



there are orders and degrees of mind, and it is 
only the blind who cannot see that the equality 
of the one is as wild a dream as the equality of 
the other. 

In the new Islands of the Pacific, we behold 
a constant succession of new w T orlds emerging 
from the deep by means of the same process 
which, in the pre-Adamite world, formed and 
elevated the islands and continents of the 
Northern hemisphere. Minute polypi are se- 
creting from the waters, and fixing on the 
summits of submarine volcanoes, the solid and 
durable limestone which now forms their pro- 
tection from the waves, and which wall here- 
after form the foundations on which accumu- 
lated detritus will heap up fertile soils and 
habitable lands.* Earthquakes are continually 



* "The prodigious extent of the comhined and unin- 
termitting labours of these little world- architects must 
be witnessed in order to be adequately conceived or 
realized. They have built up 400 miles of barrier reef 
on the shores of Caledonia; and on the north-east 
coast of Australia their labours extend for 1000 miles in 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 253 

pushing up these horizontal surfaces, and break- 
ing them up into mountains which, arresting 
the clouds in their progress, draw down into 
the valleys and plains the fertilizing rain. This 
smooths down the asperities of the earth- 
quake-broken surface, and softens and har- 
monizes it into that sw r eet variety which gives 
birth to 

" The pleasure situate in hill and dale/' 

To people these new lands, Nature has 
branched off from the old stock, new races 
of men of various degrees of physical develop- 
ment and intellectual endowments. While those 
nearest the old continent of Asia, and there- 



length ; averaging a quarter of a mile in breadth, and 
one hundred and fifty feet in depth. The geologist, in 
contemplating these stupendous operations, learns to 
appreciate the circumstances by which were deposited, 
in ancient times, those mountain masses of limestone, 
for the most part coralline, which abound in many 
parts of our native island." — Ansted's Ancient World, 
p. 32. 



254 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 



fore nearest to the old blood, are of the lowest 
possible mental and physical organization, little 
elevated above the low-class animals — the kan- 
garoo and the ornithorynchus* — of the Austra- 
lian plains, those at a greater distance — the 
New Zealander and the Otaheitan — exhibit a 
development which may vie with that of the 
Caucasian nations ; and which has proved its 
equality by not sinking before them, but main- 
taining against Saxon invaders equal rights 
and equal privileges. 

We have a striking instance of this before 
us at the present time. The British Legis- 



* Zoologists class the Marsupiala as the very lowest 
form of Mammalia, and but little removed above the 
cold-blooded Reptilia. They are a connecting link 
between those two great classes of Vertebrata. The 
Ornithorynchus is an animal of still lower organiza- 
tion. The whole fauna and flora of Australia indicate 
a newly-formed land, and are analogous to those of the 
Poilitic and New Red Sandstone Ages of the Northern 
Hemisphere ; which in like manner succeeded Coralline 
Limestones, and in which small islands began to be 
united into large islands and quasi- continents. 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 255 

lature having, in ignorance of the deter- 
mined character and clever good sense of the 
New Zealanders, endeavoured to force upon 
them a Constitution which deprived them of 
legislative privileges equal with those of the 
colonists, and which gave to the latter the 
power of taxing the former without their con- 
sent, the natives have resented the injustice 
so firmly, but hitherto peaceably, that the 
Governor, Sir George Grey, has been compelled 
to suspend this so-called Constitution, lest it 
should foment a war of the most deadly cha- 
racter. It is worthy of observation that the 
injustice attempted to be done to this shrewd 
and spirited people, is not one of an evident 
physical character, such as any savage can ap- 
preciate, but one of a purely theoretical and 
political nature, the importance of which is even 
yet hardly sufficiently understood and appre- 
ciated in any country besides England. Sir 
George Grey writes to the Home Government 
as follows : — 

" By the introduction of the proposed con- 
stitution into the provinces of New Zealand, her 
Majesty's Ministers would not confer, as it was 



256 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

intended, upon her subjects the blessings of self- 
government, but would be giving power to a 
small minority (the colonists). She would 
not be giving to her subjects the right to manage 
their affairs as they might think proper, but 
would be giving to a small minority a power to 
raise taxes from the great majority (the Abo- 
rigines). There was no reason to think that 
the majority of the aboriginal inhabitants 
would be satisfied with the rule of the minority ; 
while there were many reasons for believing that 
they would resist to the uttermost. They were a 
people of strong natural sense and ability, but 
by nature jealous and suspicious. Many of 
them were owners of vessels, horses, and cattle, 
and had considerable sums of money at their 
disposal, and there ivas no people he was 
acquainted with less likely to sit down 
quietly under what they might regard a* an 
injustice." 

" For these and other reasons, the Governor 
announced that he should not proclaim the con- 
stitution before receiving fresh instructions from 
the Colonial Office. 

"The tone of the most trustworthy corre- 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 257 

spondence from New Zealand, proves that this 
exercise of independent authority on the part of 
Governor Grey has saved the colony from 
disastrous consequences. Ministers acknowledge 
his superior competency to judge in a matter 
of this kind, and a bill has accordingly been 
introduced into the House of Commons by 
Mr. Labouchere, ' for suspending, during a 
limited time (viz. for five years), the opera- 
tion of part of the act for making further 
provision for the government of the New 
Zealand Islands. 5 "* 

Thus has this noble people, with a strong 
natural sense and ability not hitherto supposed 
to belong innately to " savages" opposed more 
successfully the first step in tyranny — the power 
of unrepresented taxation — than any other 
nation (except the Saxon), which has ever 
existed, civilized or uncivilized. 

This has been done within twenty years after 
their actual beneficial contact with civilization • 



* Leeds Mercury, Jan. 1848. 



258 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

but it was more than 600 years after the 
Norman conquest, before the Saxon roused 
himself to enforce the same right of self- taxation. 
There could be but one better evidence than 
this of the high class mind of this people ; and 
it has furnished this one better, and best 
evidence — its speedy and conscientious reception 
of Christianity. 

While for several centuries missionaries of 
every denomination have laboured in Asia in 
vain; no sooner was Christianity efficiently 
made known to the New Zealanders, than 
catching at once with a remarkable aptitude its 
leading characteristics, and, appreciating imme- 
diately its beneficent doctrines, they accepted 
it; and now, together with other Polynesian 
islands, New Zealand affords the proudest 
conquest and the richest harvest of the soldier 
of Christ. 

Yet apparently, for no nation could Chris- 
tianity be less adapted, and no nation could 
be expected to afford less hope of speedy con- 
version. The Pagan New Zealander was a 
fierce, blood-thirsty monster, spending his whole 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 259 

life, and finding all his pleasures in the most 
savage warfare. Not content with slaying his 
enemies in combat, he sat down afterwards with 
a joyous enthusiasm worthy of a fiend, to make 
a feast on their carcasses. Human sacrifices 
stained his altars, and hideously - deformed 
images pourtrayed his debased notions of a 
God. 

On the other hand, the peaceable and mild 
Hindoos, whose religion forbids bloody sacrifices 
of any kind, and enjoins the careful preservation 
of the spirit of life, even in the meanest forms ; 
whose singular traditions of the incarnate 
Chreeshna seem to point distinctly to a Messiah, 
and whose remarkable Trimurti, three in one, 
and one in three, seems to open a way to the 
facile reception of the difficult doctrine of a 
Trinity in Unity, have never, as a nation, a 
province, or even a small village, embraced 
Christianity. China, which has its similar 
traditions, whose sages have taught that " The 
true Holy One is to be found in the West," and 
that " Eternal reason (Aoyog) produced One, 
Pne produced Two, Two produced Three, and 
Three produced all things," and whose calm 



260 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

stoicism and severe morality are so accordant 
with the external symptoms of a Christian 
mind, has hardly furnished a single convert, and 
apparently feels no curiosity about the religion 
of the Fan qui (white devils). 

If history is the past teaching lessons to the 
future, surely our Missionary Societies might 
take a lesson from these facts, and withdraw 
their exertions from so hopeless a field as Asia, 
and expend them on the hopeful soil of Polynesia. 
Surely if the great Apostle of the Gentiles, 
who was specially appointed to bring into the 
fold of Christ " all nations" was forbidden to 
preach the Word to the effete nations of Asia, 
it is not given to his successors to contravene 
the inspired mandate. 

Other injunctions of Scripture to the apos- 
tolic Church are rightly interpreted as applicable, 
and to be obeyed by, the Church in all future 
ages ; and it is a strange inconsistency, arising 
from a too warm and enthusiastic desire to 
promote the kingdom of Christ, fruitlessly to 
strive, in this instance, against the mandate of 
the Holy Spirit. 

Thus much we have said, to contrast the 






OF NATIONAL NOSES. 261 

New Zealand mind with the Hindoo and the 

Chinese, because the same contrast is manifest 
in their respective physiognomies. 




NEW ZEALANDER. 



Compare the bold energetic Roman Nose, the 
manly and commanding profile of the New 
Zealander, with the soft and rounded features 
of the Hindoo, and the flat monotonous sur- 
face of the Chinese visage. You perceive 
at a glance that the first is the face of a 
man of strong straightforward common sense, 
and intense energy. He may not be an 
acute and subtle reasoner ; but he catches 
at once the leading points of a subject, 



262 OF NATIONAL NOSES. 

instantly decides, and instantly acts upon his 
decision. 

While the two latter remain in imperturbable 
absorption, and while the subtle " Greek " would 
be thinking too precisely on the event, 

" A thought which, quartered, hath but one part wisdom, 
And ever three parts coward," 

the " Roman " has been, and seen, and con- 
quered. He is come back, at home, resting 
after his successful toil; while the "Snub" is 
thinking about getting out of bed, and the 
" Greek " is making up his mind whether it is 
" worth while " to go out. 

Thus we have, from divers sources, brought 
together, briefly and succinctly, a few of the 
universal proofs which establish Nasology as a 
science. From individuals and from nations we 
have gathered the basis of our nosological laws ; 
and we trust we have produced conviction in 
some minds that " the Nose is an index to 
Character ;" if not, we shall not say to the 
reader, as phrenologists do to their incredulous 



OF NATIONAL NOSES. 263 

auditors, that it arises from his defective 
organization, but rather attribute it to 
our own defective mode of argumentation; 
for we shall not willingly admit the erro- 
neousness of a system which has been 
built up upon many years of personal ob- 
servation both among the dead and among 
the living. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 

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